Chilmark welcomes the lion this year as March will begin with snow and cold, and has us looking forward to the early spring. Folklore promises March will go out like a lamb. My prose is seriously affected by this long, cold winter, and by the deadly silence that is Chilmark this week of school vacation and, traditionally, the week when everyone who can, finds a warmer island to visit!

Harriette Otteson Poole is back at her Chilmark home after an interesting eight-day trip to Jamaica. She travelled with a group of 12 people on a field visit arranged by UNICEF to show interested people the work they are doing in Jamaica and the advances being made in the social and health issues pertaining to children. The group toured schools, met families and visited hospitals to learn what progress has been made with UNICEF investments. They met with the UNICEF ambassador to Jamaica, two-time Olympic gold medal runner Shelley Ann Fraiser Pryce, and traveled from Kingston to Montego Bay. She reports that it was a most interesting learning experience and adventure.

Friends and family are happy to know that Elmore Bud Mayhew is recuperating at home following surgery at the Falmouth Hospital this past Wednesday. We look forward to seeing him out and about soon.

Chilmark seasonal resident and hard-working artist, Carol Brown Goldberg, will be showing her work at the Gabarron Foundation, Carriage House Center for the Arts, 149 East 38 street, New York city, from March 1 through April 25. If you are in the neighborhood, you might enjoy the show. There are 12 artists featured.

We are all invited to the spring meeting of the Martha’s Vineyard Cultural Arts Council on March 9 from 9 a.m. to noon at Howes House in West Tisbury. The council awards grants to a wide range of art projects and this is the time for the public to make suggestions, recommendations and ask questions about the process and the grants available. Breakfast treats will be offered.

Lynn Ditchfield of ACE MV is busy this week alerting us all to the registration information for the spring classes that will begin in April. If you are as bored with this winter as I am, you might want to sign up for one or another of the varied classes being offered. Several are sponsored by local businesses, groups and friends: Slow Food MV, the Chilmark Writing Workshop, Featherstone and others. Check it all out at acemv.org or call 774-310-1131 or email lynn@acemv.org. Registration is open to all and there will be walk-in registration at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4.

The Martha’s Vineyard Cancer Support Group is happy to tell us that Daffodil Days will continue this year. This event is always the beginning of spring for many of us. Speaking of daffodils, mine are up about five inches in the front yard. The very sight of them when the snow finally melted was a boost to the heart!

The selectmen will hold their third public forum on the Squibnocket Beach proposal on Tuesday, March 11 at 7 p.m. at town hall. The three consultants retained by the selectmen will present their findings and there will be time for questions and answers afterwards. The Squibnocket Farm Homeowners Association will make a presentation on the proposed plan for an elevated roadway. Everyone is invited to come and hear the details about this plan. We will be asked to vote on it at town meeting in April so now is the time to learn the details. If you have any questions, call town hall.

Some of you might appreciate the words of C. A. Crowell Jr., superintendent of schools on Martha’s Vineyard 100 years ago. This is some of what he wrote in the town report of 1914: “Agriculture should be studied more in school than it is at present. The child in school must be made to feel that the life of the farmer is a calling truly as dignified as that of the merchant, the teacher or the minister. When our children feel thus toward farm life they will then aspire to become farmers.”

However, he also said this: “Our girls need some education in school in the practical things of home work.”

He went on to refer to cooking and sewing, but we will skip that! He finished by saying that Chilmark may have in its schools “a boy, who, with careful and sympathetic guidance, will become, when a man, the pride of his birthplace and of his state.”

I might add that women gained the right to vote in 1920.