A reader once remarked that her favorite parts of the Gazette were the town columns, because they made her feel like the Vineyard was a place where she could belong.

Who doesn’t care to be welcomed back after a winter away, to have one’s birthday or anniversary remembered, to be wished a speedy recovery after an unexpected illness, to be comforted on the loss of a loved one? These slender acknowledgments can be nourishment for those who long not simply to live on the Island, but to be a part of it.

June Manning knew the power of simple connections. You could read it in her weekly dispatches from Aquinnah, where she penned the town column for nearly three decades, knitting a portrait of small-town life from a thousand tiny events. You could hear it in her greetings, calling cheerily to a friend she spotted at a meeting or in the grocery store. Or you could simply ask members of the Coast Guard station at Menemsha, for whom she was Grandma June.

“Thank you for making this Island feel like home for many of ua so far from our friends and families. You will be greatly missed,” they wrote on the station’s Facebook page after learning of June’s death this week.

A member of the Wampanoag tribe and a lifelong resident of Martha’s Vineyard, June had every reason to claim primacy as an Islander, but her every instinct ran to welcoming new people to the Island she loved.

In Wampanoag, the term for farewell is peesh kunaush, which translates as “I will see you.”

Throughout her remarkable life, June understood that people needed to be seen.

Peesh kunaush, Grandma June.