Is this another bi-annual "erosion report" issue of the Nantucket Calendar? Yes, and for this year's update flip right back to the cover and the large Dutch colonial house on the crumbling 'Sconset bluff. It's not there anymore — cut in two in mid-2010, it was hauled five miles to a new water-view lot in Monomoy. For the owner, ten years and a million dollars worth of dirt dumped over the lip became "shoveling sand against the tide" incarnate. The house three doors up Baxter Road managed to leave the neighborhood in one piece, on its way to sunset views on the wes tside of 'Sconset. As for those houses that remain on the North Bluff, all have moved back at least once. Next stop either some place else, or an eighty-foot drop to the beach and an insurance claim.

At the opposite end of the island, Madaket seems to have faired better, with the beach at Smith Point wide enough to be re-opened to jeep traffic. But that's an illusion — llook at the November photo in your '10 calendar (it's on the wall.) The beach is broadened now only because those dunes have been beheaded by wind and tide. This year's January picture tells the tale, the foreground is now under water.

If change is the only constant — and my constant Nantucket theme — turn to February. Smarties will spot the papered-over windows of Congdon's Pharmacy, the store having then just closed forever, dating the photo to January '08. But real hawkeyes will recall a more recent loss, that of an even more ancient Main Street fixture, the Mitchell's Book Corner elm. A mature specimen in 1895 when it appeared in Henry Wyer's photograph of "The Boston Store," the great Main Street bookend succumbed last year to disease, and we to great dismay. (See Wyer's photo at nha.org, Image Number GPN4490.)

There was much greater loss, though, that of Mimi Beman, the great elm of the bookstore itself. As so many island authors said at her passing, you had better bring you're A-game because she wanted good stuff. She called this piece "Dick's lighthouse calendar," which of course reduced the annual appearances of the three island beacons to no more than two. Let's put it this way, without her thirty years of support there would be no Nantucket Calendar. Period and exclamation point. Thanks, Mimi.

Dick Mackay