Good Neighbors

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • February 18, 2025

Good neighbors seem hard to come by these days. And, by these days, I mean the last thirty or more years. There are still good neighbors out there but many neighborhoods are not what they once were. People tend to be more insular, inside more often on devices, not outside tending to their yards or just sitting on the front porch. Children do not run rampant over yards and fences, multiple ages playing outside until the last gasp of daylight. Grown-ups are not inviting one another over for dinner or giving each other a hand as they once did. In elementary school, my best friend’s family moved in across the street (how lucky was I?!). Our bedrooms were directly opposite one another and we developed a flashlight signal to share from our windows. After Hurricane Gloria, without power for days, our two families gathered to clean out the refrigerators and freezers before things spoiled. Our father’s grilled it all on charcoal grills so we could have a hot feast – and save the food. Does that happen anymore? We are all more focused on ourselves than one another.


The MMA recently lost a good neighbor. Nancy lived on Vestal Street for twenty-five or more years with her husband in a house that was once occupied by another good neighbor. I think a little osmosis might have been at work but also, simply, Nancy was a good neighbor.  I would liken her to the “Mayor of Vestal Street.” She looked out for people, paid attention, invited her neighbors for dinner, and helped them out. She certainly helped the MMA out. She offered to garden – and re-did our Astronomer’s Cottage garden and side yard. She painted window boxes. She donated an old door she had so we could replace a rotting door we had. She donated a refrigerator – still humming along nicely in one of our dorms. She welcomed a Mitchell House intern into her home to look at the grain painting in her home from the nineteenth century as the intern worked to study the grain painting in the Mitchell House’s 1825 Kitchen. She attended our events. She was a member. She helped out in other areas of the MMA with advice and support. She swept at least weekly – if not more – the stones from our driveway that constantly tumbled into the street. She gave us plants, kept her eye on things, and looked out for our staff and interns, too. She even gave me a few dresses she could not wear and a baby gift when we brought our son home.  She was a mensch.


Finding out about her death knocked me down. I keep expecting her to be outside sweeping or walking her beloved dog or putting a new flower arrangement in her front window. She loved her historic home and she and her husband worked very hard to preserve it and also restore details that were lost over the last 100 or more years. She was an incredibly talented and smart person and had a whole other life in Boston where she worked for many years in human resources. I could not think of a better person to have such an occupation. She always had a smile on her face and was ready with support.


Good neighbors are hard to come by. I hope that Nancy and her memory inspire a few more people to be good neighbors in this world. 


The step, however small, which is in advance of the world, shows the greatness of the person, whether that step be taken with brain, with heart, or with hands. – Maria Mitchell


JNLF

Recent Posts

A Good Chair

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 18, 2026
A repost from long ago – because I still like a good chair. Quite awhile ago, I wrote about some of my collection addictions, including pottery shards, 19 th century kitchen mirrors, and of course, enamelware. Well, here is another one for you. I love chairs. Yes, this is another collection addiction of mine. But not all chairs – chairs from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, I like plain, simple wood chairs with a horizontal piece or two of wood for the back and a plain, thick wood seat. Simple, not a lot of turns to the wood, and not a lot of decorative features or paint. Several years ago, I had a meeting at the home of the leader of a group I was working with. She owned the Obed Macy house, very much untouched and quite a remarkable house. Yes, Obed was the Nantucket historian (among other things), as well as the son of island entrepreneur Judith Macy, and the nephew of the island “she-pirate” Kezia Coffin. We met outside on the side porch which was a late 19 th century addition to the house and one that certainly reflected what life was like in the period it was added to the house. The owner had brought out every chair in her home. I was on a chair high (not a highchair!) – here I had my choice of nineteenth chairs to sit on. Since I was one of the first to arrive, I took my time picking out which chair I was going to sit on – I kid you not. I was like Goldilocks − though I was grown-up enough not to sit on every chair to decide which one I was going to claim for the meeting! I went on and on and likely on and on about all these lovely chairs to her. Unfortunately, the day came several years later when she was faced with having to sell her beloved home to move off-island. She called me. She wanted to know if I wanted any of her chairs since she remembered how much I went on and on about them. It was a mixture of emotion because losing this island resident was a loss for the island and for its history and historic architecture. I went to her home a few days before she was going to have her sale and helped her move items from the house out onto the lovely 19 th century side porch where I first reveled in her chair collection and also out into the large, simple backyard that looked like it too had not been touched since the 19 th century. She told me to take whichever chairs I wanted as she wanted me to have them. Depressing. I told her I would not take but that I would buy. We had a little back and forth but she finally relented. Then, I had to choose and it was quite agonizing. Not wanting to be a chair hog, I limited myself. I now have two matching and two others sitting around my dining room table made from salvaged Nantucket pine floorboards. We refer to them as “Helen’s chairs” – their previous owner. She likely found them here on Nantucket; one or more may have even come with the house when she bought it. We eat every meal sitting in them, spend time with our family in long discussions and laughter sitting in them, and each time I sit, touch, dust, or move them, I think of Helen and the house these chairs once sat in and the conversations and people they must have witnessed over the many years. A simple wood chair – a witness to history and time. JNLF

The Ancient Vine

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 11, 2026
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Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 4, 2026
May 6, 1878 Between the clouds, Miss Spalding obtained 7 photographs of Mercury on the Sun. It is comfort to me to be able to plan and do a new kind of work. The large telescope worked better than usual, Clark having just been to the Observatory. Clark, as in Alvan Clark, a man who would become the premier telescope maker in America and who built Maria Mitchell’s 5-inch Alvan Clark refractor that she purchased from him (after working with him to build it per her specifications) with money gifted to her from “The Women of America” led by Elizabeth Peabody. More than likely, it is this telescope she is referring to as she did use it in the Vassar College Observatory with her students – and it is also taking center stage in photographs, along with her (first her father’s) Dolland telescope.  Maria had decided she would photograph the Sun on every clear day, and this was one of those results. She would use these images, with her students, to study sun spots and their changes. With her students, Maria would photograph the transit of Mercury as noted above. She would also photograph the transit of Venus a few years later with her students. JNLF
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