Visitors come to Martha’s Vineyard in August for the corn. There is no other reasonable explanation. If you are a guest from the city, and you believe corn is something that comes in a freezer pack of yellow nuggets to be zapped in a microwave, listen up. Here on the Island, your dinner host may at some point hand you some stiff, leaf-covered, elongated objects with rounded edges and ask you to sit on the porch and shuck them — that is, peel them.

Here are the basics. When corn is raw it is called an ear. Once it is cooked, it becomes corn on the cob, not corn on the ear.

The corn is divine and sublime right now, and thanks to scientific intervention should remain so for a while. Back in the day, Tom Waldron swore the water had to be boiling before he stepped out to his garden to pluck the corn from its sheaves.

If you’re supplying the corn, don’t examine it by peeling it part-way down. Merchants and farmers frown at your opening their packages. What are you looking for anyway? And don’t buy it from a cardboard bin marked ‘local’ in a grocery store. Get it from a farm stand, ideally just as the water starts to boil. When you are done, wipe the butter and the grin off your mouth.

Plenty of reminders of Prairie Home Companion abound this week. Some at the federal election level, I am happy to report, and some locally as well. This is the week we West Tiburyites love to be country folks, cornball silly. The Agricultural Fair takes place Thursday, August 15 through Sunday, August 18. Just a two-step and a couple of days away is Contra dancing at the Grange on Tuesday, August 20, at 6:30 p.m. With live music and a live caller, contra dancing is something like square dancing and unrelated to Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua.

A generation of West Tisbury-born-and-raised adults who went to school with our daughter, Chloe, are back on the Island with their families to partake of the fair. Most of them have come home from that other coast. Andrea Silva, her husband Das Louter and their son Lee have come from the Los Angeles area. Guinevere Higgins, her husband Gerald and son Andre are here too at fair-time. Hannah Keefe, her husband Andrew Reed and daughter Sunny are also here from California. Hannah’s brothers Joe and Sebastian Keefe, also Californians, visited with their families earlier in the summer.

Bi-coastal and part-time resident, Dr. Julie Prazich, has returned to her home in San Diego but will be back in the fall. Another bi-coastal, some-time West Tisburyite, author Perry Garfinkel, will appear on the Islanders Write panel at Featherstone Monday, August 19, and deliver a book talk at the West Tisbury Library at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, August 23. Perry will be back in town, staying in Mark Mazer’s extra house for the upcoming winter, to work on a coming-of-age memoir.

Happy Birthday to Ashley Medowski Thursday, August 22.

Will Whiting, who spends most of his days in Pawtucket, R.I, has brought his daughter Prudence to enjoy the fair.