With all the cold and rainy weather it’s as if the seasons have been trying to go backwards. No doubt we’ll be complaining about the heat before long, though. Memorial Day weekend seemed quiet, but since I mostly stayed home, I can’t be sure about that. I was surprised at how many people were still around on Tuesday. Usually there is a lull after the long weekend, but unlike the weather, there is no going backwards as far as the influx of summer.

Chappaquiddick was well represented at the Lesley University Graduate School commencement last Saturday in Boston. Both Jenna Zadeh and Katherine Villard-Howe received master’s degrees.

Jenna studied for a dual master’s degree in special education and elementary education while interning at the Maria L. Baldwin School in Cambridge. Her parents, Harold and Patty, her brother, Lari, and her fiancé, Matthew, were there to share in her delight.

In this typically tardy Vineyard spring, the Chappaquiddick trees are finally decked out in all their finery — delicate leaves, dangling catkins, and frilly blossoms that entice the bees to do their job while we shiver in the morning, refusing to get the stove going because it’s the middle of May, for God’s sake!

Adeline Mae Chandler took her first breath at noon on Friday, May 3, to the great delight of her parents Abigail and Curtis along with grandmother Sharlee, who arose very early that morning to be by her daughter’s side for the birth of her first granddaughter. Adeline weighed in at 7 pounds, 2 ounces and measured 19 and a half inches long.

Spring came this past week, finally, with all its interest for the senses. Chappaquiddick’s many late-leafing oaks still give the woods a wintery look. The honeysuckle and low bushes along the roadsides are covered with tiny vibrant green leaves, and the grass has a brilliant glow. The fragrant mayflowers, or trailing arbutus, can be found at the edges of dirt roads where there’s not too much sun.

When I was a little kid, on May Day my mother would send me out with little baskets of flowers for each of the neighbor ladies. We made the baskets out of purple construction paper and filled them with pansies and johnny-jump-ups. The ladies were so delighted that I was convinced at a very early age that you really can’t go wrong with flowers. I still enjoy bringing home a big bouquet of roses.

On a small island, everything that goes on seems to have a greater effect than in a place less circumscribed. We’ve certainly seen the extended and radiating effects of big storms in recent years, but it’s true about the small things as well. When someone paints a ring of daffodils around the bottom of a telephone pole, it can make a lot of people smile, which has a ripple effect through the whole population.

The next Chappy Community Center potluck supper will be on Wednesday, April 17 and is hosted by Tom Osborn. I hope that Tom will bring a pot of South Dakota mashed potatoes. Once you have a taste you will never be satisfied with any other. Tom’s signature is in the form of a depression on the top in the exact size and shape of a whole stick of butter that soaked into the potatoes as it melted.

Happy belated birthday to Harold Zadeh, who turned 65 on March 26. Sadly, that day also marks his retirement from firefighting duty in the Edgartown Fire Department. Harold has been a firefighter for nearly a quarter of a century, and for the last eight years served as the Lieutenant of Chappy’s Fire Pumper #3.

After extensive public input last summer, the transportation committee working on redesign of the Chappaquiddick Point has come up with a final design. This spring, a roundabout will be built where the traffic from the ferry, the waiting line, the main road, and the parking lot converge.