Spring? yes, no, maybe

It's definitely time to get rid of the snow picdture. Spring may be here -- I was able to walk on the beach for a while yesterday but the wind off the ocean was very chilly.  The ocean was far calmer than this photo of the surf which is higher than any that we have in Hyannis -- this was at Nauset Beach in Orleans which my daughter calls "the real ocean". We are protected from  such surf and from the way it eats at dunes by the fat blob of land just at our horizon called Martha's Vineyard. 

Friday night I went to a documentary shown at the Unity Church which houses an EarthCare Ministry team. In April (Earth month), they show a film each Friday, free and open to the public, about an ecological subject. Last year I went to two that were about whales; beautiful films from which I learned a lot. This past Friday it was a film called One Big Home, about, really not one, but many, an almost staggering number of big homes that have been build in the last ten years on that once quaint and rather modest island. The filmmaker, Thomas Bena was present; he talked and answered questions afterward. These are called Trophy Houses, a phenonmenon that aggrivates almost all of Cape Cod's towns as well as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Not only are they far larger than the homes that were previously there (many of which have been torn down by the builders of these sturctures) but they are used, in most cases far less than 6 months of the year.

Bene spent ten years making this film, in the course of which he married, had a child, bought a small old home that was beyond repair (though he tired diligently to do so). He built a larger home than he ever expected to have. He filmed many locals, many town meetings, a very verbal architect, and did a good documentary job.  He is going around to gatherings like this speaking about the rampant ostentatious and ecologically destructive habits of the very wealth and how the less affluent residents can come together to at last enact regulations that put some brakes on the destruction of their way of tlife.