Outside my bay window I can see a parade of saris, hijabs, turbans, baseball caps, blue jeans, you name it.
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The sky was dark when I came out of Pilates at 11:30am on Tuesday, July 22. Two of the young women who work at the club were standing outside, looking at the sky with dread. “What’s up?” “There’s a tornado warning for Vineyard Haven”. “Oh dear, I had planned to go there to grocery shop. Guess I’ll go home first, eat lunch, wait out the storm, then head over.” The women thought that was a better idea. The black cloud came over me as I drove the few minutes home, dumping rain on me. I got an alert that the warning was over, but tornadoes had touched down just across the Vineyard Sound on Cape Cod, in Yarmouth and Harwich. Boston.com showed the radar with the debris field. I have friends with homes in both towns. I quickly contacted one; his best friend, who owns a home 10 minutes from his was on his way down to survey the damage. I contacted him and got the good news that both their homes had been spared.

A huge thunderstorm had moved through the evening before, causing a brief power outage in our Vineyard home. When I contacted my friend in Harwich, she described the two days thusly: she had a household full of family from around the country. That thunder storm that caused us to be in the dark on Monday night she felt much more keenly. “Monday night was terrifying – I thought for sure, the emerald city was our next stop! But Ohio-based sister and family are very familiar with tornadoes and knew to take down the pool umbrellas, secure the outdoor furniture. Next day, out of nowhere!!! So many trees down, no power- we finally got a portable generator from someone but no internet- it’s a combination of a camping adventure and a series of aggravations! But good news is everyone is fine – no one is hurt.”

A day later the National Weather Service confirmed that a third tornado had touched down briefly on Tuesday in West Yarmouth, painfully close to my two friends’ homes. As one put it, they truly dodged a bullet. This is extremely rare, according to the National Weather Service. Since the beginning of recorded weather history, tornadoes have hit Cape Cod just three other times; one in Woods Hole in October 2018, one at Hyannis/Barnstable Airport in August 1977 and one near Sandwich in August 1968. The weather is becoming more ferocious. “Once in a hundred year storms” are coming regularly.

The last weekend of July, all of northern Europe had an extraordinary heat wave. London saw its thermometer hit 100 degrees, Paris was 109. These are old cities and not equipped with air conditioning. They don’t know how to handle heat waves. July was the warmest month every recorded in Boston. April was the rainiest. Weather records are falling constantly.

We saw it hail one day in Edgartown in late June. No one can remember such a weather occurrence. This is all a result of global warming. The oceans are heating up. The ice caps are melting. There is more carbon in the atmosphere.

I recently heard Juliette Kayyem speak. She is a former Under Secretary of Homeland Security. While her topic was primarily immigration, she took questions. When asked what the greatest threat to our national security is, without hesitation, she said global warming, about which this current administration is doing nothing at all! It will cause MORE immigration, as people across the globe face drought and famine, causing starvation and sickness. Vast populations will be on the move, seeking water and food. Hurricanes will cause thousands of death and trillions in property damage and we will not be able to rebuild on the same locations, causing dislocation. Insurance companies and governments won’t be able to cover losses in places like New Orleans, built below sea level, where the levees will not hold and the houses can no longer be rebuilt as they were, wiping out old communities.

A smart government would make planning for this a top priority, but we don’t have a smart government. We have a government in the pocket of the coal and oil companies, who are about lining their pockets and short-term wealth, rather than the long-term good of their people and the planet. We will all pay for this eventually.

Neighbors from my early years to my later years...how they became a piece of my heart.
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I always wanted a neighbor that I could talk to over the back fence. You see it in comic strips, TV shows and movies. BFFs who live next door to each other. But I wonder if it ever happens in real life.

In my childhood, we knew our neighbors but were not friends with them. Our house was on a corner lot, and our neighbors were the Cozzarelli family on our front-door side, and the Pitrelli family on our side-door side. Traditional Italian families, each had an elderly grandmother who dressed all in black and didn’t speak English, multiple sons and daughters, and their assorted children and, eventually, grandchildren. When a son got married, he would bring his bride home to live in the house with the rest of the family. It seemed like there were always lots of babies, and lots of adults, but nobody the right age for me to play with. They bought Girl Scout cookies from me, and that was the only contact I ever had with them.

When my father retired in 1978, and my parents wanted to sell the house and move to an adult community, guess who bought the house from them? One of the Cozzarelli sons had married one of the Pitrelli daughters, and they were thrilled to be able to move out of whichever family’s house they were living in and get their own place right next door. Many years later, my sisters and I took our kids to see the house, and were able to go inside and check out what they had done with it. Some things were different, but much was still the same. And their extended family still lived next door to them on both streets. That’s what I call great neighbors!

When I bought my first house on my own, in 1979, my friend Jane lived across the street. She was someone I had known slightly in law school (she was two years ahead of me), and then got to know better when I went to work at the Attorney General’s Office, where she was already working. We even had offices on the same floor of the building. She had enough seniority in the office to have a parking space, so a big benefit of becoming her neighbor was that we could carpool to work and I wasn’t at the mercy of the parking wait-list. Naturally driving to and from work together every day we got to know each other pretty well, and soon we were best friends. So then we were always running back and forth to each other’s house to borrow a cup of sugar, or a couple of joints, whatever was needed. When she had a big dinner party, we carried all the dirty dishes over to my house to wash in the dishwasher, because her house didn’t have one. She was probably the best neighbor I have ever had. We didn’t share a fence, of course, because she was on the other side of the street, but it was otherwise a perfect arrangement. Then she quit her job, sold her house, and moved to Spain, and that was the end of that.

In my current house, where I have lived since 1992, we have dramatically different relationships with the next door neighbors on each side.

On our east side are Paul and Erin, neighbors who are friendly but not friends. We do watch each other’s houses when someone goes on vacation, and the kids of each family have made a little money feeding the pets of the other family when they are away. Once, when my husband was out of town and Molly and I got locked out of the house, Paul was the one who climbed up onto the roof and got in a second story window to let us in. So they are there in an emergency, which is great, but not people that we socialize with, perhaps because they are a lot younger.

On the west side we have Brian and Ellie, who are the neighbors from hell. When we first moved in, Brian was a bachelor living there with a male roommate who was unobtrusive. Brian, however, was annoying from the beginning. Hard to remember exactly why, but he just got on our nerves. Apparently he got on other people’s nerves too. Late one night we heard the crash of breaking glass. We looked out the front window, and saw a woman jump into a car and speed away. It turned out she had thrown a large rock through his window. We never found out exactly why, although our assumption was that she was a jilted lover. Of course we never told Brian we had seen her and knew what kind of car she was driving. He never asked, but I’m not sure we would have divulged anything if he had.

When the fence between our two yards needed to be replaced, Brian refused to share the cost. He claimed that in our neighborhood, the rule was that you paid for the fence on your west side, not your east side, and since he was to the west of us, he wasn’t responsible. We have never met anyone else in this neighborhood who has heard of this supposed rule, and when the fence on our east side needed to be replaced, we split the cost with Paul and Erin. For the fence on the west, we put in a new fence that went only as far as the gate across our driveway, and ignored the remaining six or so feet to the back corner of his house. When Brian asked when we were going to finish the fence, we replied that we were done, because it didn’t matter to us whether that other part was fenced or not. So ultimately he paid someone to do that part, and had to make it match the part that we had done.

When he married Ellie, we thought that things might improve, but they didn’t. In fact, they then put in a hot tub on their back porch, very close to our bedroom window. Admittedly, when you are sitting in a hot tub with the jets going, you do have to talk pretty loud to be heard over them. Unfortunately for us, it sounds like they are IN our bedroom having their conversation, especially when they have friends over and are drinking a lot, which is most of the time. I have gone out there a couple of times at 11 or 12 at night to ask them to be quiet, but it never does any good. There are so many more incidents I could write about, but I will stop there, because it just makes me angry all over again thinking about them.

I don’t ever expect to move out of this house, and I fear that Brian and Ellie are there for the long haul too, so I may be stuck with them for the rest of my life. Not a very pleasing prospect to have them around, spoiling my little corner of the world. I guess I should just be grateful they don’t have a barking dog!