What Do You Love About The Vineyard?

Why do we choose to live on Martha's Vineyard? What's unique about this place we call home? 

Since it's Valentine's Day, we want to hear from you about what you love most about the Island and what makes it so special.

Please post comments and pictures here to share the love. I'll start:

I love MV because I did a lot of my growing up here and because it's in my DNA from both sides of my family, going back three generations on my father's side and two on my mother's.

Mom and her brother Henry Robinson grew up in what is now called the Dr. Daniel Fisher House, next to the Old Whaling Church on Main Street in Edgartown. These days, she lives near the Edgartown Light — very near, in summer, when she rents out her house and moves aboard her trawler Illusion.

Dad's grandfather bought a big unheated house on North Water Street, now numbered 104, which stayed in the family as a summer home until the 1990s; it's changed hands more than once since then and has been renovated almost out of recognition, but I still feel a pull when I walk by the place.

I also love the beauty of nature here, the birds, the terminal-moraine landscape and the way that the MV Land Bank, Sheriff's Meadow Foundation, Trustees of Reservations and other groups preserve precious open space for all of us to enjoy.

It's a marvel that I can walk through Sheriff's Meadow and see much the same views as I did in my childhood, when I sometimes met family friend Henry Beetle Hough with his collie Graham.

In fact, I could write a whole article about my lifetime love for the Vineyard, but the point is to find out what you love about living here. So let's hear it, Islanders! And happy Valentine's Day.

You may also be interested in:

• Last-Minute Valentine Gifts on Martha’s Vineyard (Louisa, Patch community)
• Lent Begins: Where's the Best Fish? (Patch community)
•  (Louisa)
  
• Up-Island Businesses Hang On Through Winter (Louisa)
• Vineyard to Vineyard: Of All the Gin Joints ... (Louisa's blog)
  
•  (Eileen M Lauinger photos)
• Snow Transforms Island Landscapes (Geraldine Moriarty photos)
• Martha's Vineyard Pics & Clips (Patch community photos)
•  (Louisa)
• SHOW US: Blizzard Outside My Window (Patch community photos)
• Share Your Photos: How Much Snow Do You Have? (Patch community photos)
• Snow: A Sunday Afternoon Poem (Lee McCormack)
• Island Priest Backs Pope's Decision to Resign (Louisa)

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