"send cash" … or "send ash"
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Off of West Tisbury Road, in Katama, the beachy section of Edgartown, just a few minutes away from my home on Martha’s Vineyard, is this glorious farm stand; Morning Glory Farm. They have their own fields and sell their own produce throughout the season, open from just before Memorial Day until the day before Thanksgiving, but have grown significantly throughout the 26 years since we’ve come to this island and now carry much more than just their own produce.

They have a wonderful bake shop with home made pies and breads. My favorite summer treat is their zucchini bread (with maybe a bit of cream cheese). This was before I became more aware of my food choices, seven years ago. I could go crazy with that stuff. It was such a sweet treat. 

A few years ago, they significantly rebuilt and added on, so it is more of a general store, with a refrigerated section, selling meats, dairy, all sorts of unusual and yummy salads; one-stop shopping, though the bill will set you back a ridiculous amount.

They offer their own cook books, baking tips, exotic apples, a garden store, coffee and hot muffins, cut flowers and an inviting farmer’s porch to sit and chat with friends while you share the island gossip. I was on that porch with an out-of-town friend nine years ago when I got the call that my mother was on her way to the hospital with her final, fatal illness.

We wait for their sweet corn to come in, for the sun flowers to rise in their fields, open their faces and follow the path of the sun all day, only to be cut into magnificent bouquets for us to bring home and enjoy for days in our homes, their golden aura bringing the light inside.

A dear friend gleans in their fields one day a week. They let islanders come and, as in the Bible, what cannot be picked up by the big harvesting machines, is picked up by hand by the gleaners. Some is brought home, but some is set aside for the needy on the island, for there is much need here. It is a remarkable gesture.

Just walking into the store makes one smile, as the smells are divine. People scurry by, hurried by the day. But if you have the time to appreciate the abundance and variety, it is a feast for the senses. Just remember to bring your wallets.

When I think of social media, the first thing I think of is Facebook.

For me, Facebook was always about sharing pictures and bits of news with family and friends who are scattered around the world. Now, in addition, it involves sharing links to articles about the current terrifying political situation. I have never considered it a place to make new friends. From the time I joined Facebook, my policy was to accept friend requests only from people I was actually friends with in real life. Unlike younger people I knew, who had thousands of “friends,” many of whom were people they had met once, or not at all, I had fewer than a hundred friends, all people who were important to me in real life. Once, when I was in a foreign country, using a strange computer, Facebook wanted to verify my identity, so it showed me pictures from my friends’ pages and asked me to choose which friend had posted each one. I had no trouble doing it, but it occurred to me that if I had adopted the “friend everyone you meet” philosophy, I probably couldn’t have passed the test.

The only people I have become Facebook friends with whom I didn’t know in real life are people from Retrospect. Even then, I didn’t do it right away. But after we had been reading and commenting on each other’s stories for several months, it felt like I knew them. Indeed, they knew many things about my life that my closest real-life friends, and even my family, didn’t know. When I decided I wanted to connect with one writer whose stories showed that we had a lot in common, I sent her an email asking her if she would like to be friends on Facebook, rather than just clicking the “Add Friend” button. She responded that she would, and only then did I click the button. We live on opposite sides of the country, but when I went to Cambridge for my college reunion, I made arrangements to get together with her. We greeted each other like old friends, and felt instantly comfortable. Now that I think about it, that friendship was created and nurtured on Retrospect, not on Facebook. Similarly, I am Facebook friends with about eight other people from Retrospect whom I have never met in person, but all of our interactions are here, not on Facebook.

So actually, I now realize, all my social media friendships are the product of Retrospect. I wasn’t thinking about this site as falling under the umbrella of social media, but it does. The definition of social media, which I found (where else?) online, is: “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” Retrospect was created to enable all of us baby boomers to create and share content. In the process, it turned out that we have been doing some social networking too.

The rules when we were beta testing the site back in 2016 required us to comment on other people’s stories as well as writing our own. That commenting requirement was hugely important in creating this network. When I first started writing and posting my stories, I didn’t feel any satisfaction until I got comments. And the more I got comments, the more I wanted to write stories. Those of us who are still around from the beta testing days consistently write comments on everyone’s stories. I urge the rest of you who are not in that habit to do so too. That is what makes this site so special, in my opinion, and why I couldn’t let it die when the creators decided, after three-plus years, that they didn’t want to do it any more. I could have made a blog and posted my stories there, as some of my friends and relatives were suggesting I do, but it wouldn’t have been the same without the community.

Before I started writing this story, I expected to come to the conclusion that real-life friendships are better than social media ones. But, as so often happens, I discovered what I thought by writing about it. (As another Sacramentan, Joan Didion, said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.”) And it turns out that my social media friendships created on Retrospect are just as important to me as any of my real-life friendships. Thank you for being here!