ROSEMARY IS FOR REMEMBRANCE

AN ODE TO MEALS AND MEMORIES FROM A SUMMER HOME ON MARTHA'S VINEYARD

- JESSICA B. HARRIS

Jessica B. Harris, author of the seminal cookbook High on the Hog, on the porch at her home in Oak Bluffs

THE GRAY-SHINGLED HOUSE with the pink shutters opposite the tennis courts in Oak Bluffs has been a part of my life for so long that I cannot recall what it was like not to journey to Martha's Vineyard each summer. I can still remember when my family purchased it, in 1956; the journeying up-island to retrieve the key from the realtor and the searching for the hidden fifth bedroom that was only revealed when the sun shone through a window on a back stairway. I can recollect the small living room that existed before we expanded the house in the times before the Copeland historic district and its design watchdogs put an end to that sort of thing. I vividly recall the parties that were held, the friends and relatives who visited, and my paternal grandmother sitting under the venerable oak tree that shades the house's front yard.

Jessica Harris (center) with her mother, Rhoda (left), and a childhood friend near the ferry on Martha's Vineyard in 1958; Jesse (Harris's father) and Rhoda seated at a cocktail party on a neighbor's porch; Jesse on the ferry in the early 1960s; Jessica (at right) and friends on the porch of the house in the early 2000s; Rhoda (at right) and members of the Polar Bears, a group that meets early in the morning to exercise on the beach. The vintage postcards that decorate Harris's past Bastille Day menus also appear in her book, Vintage Postcards from the African World.