It’s Sunday evening with a light drizzle. The fair is over, the president has left, and the upcoming school schedule has arrived. Hard to believe that summer for us here on the Vineyard is basically over regardless of the calendar. Both sadness and relief!

Consider yourself lucky if you are not part of the one per cent.

Lindsay Hovanesian and Trevor Harlow were married on June 8, 2013 at the Whaling Church and the Dr. Daniel Fisher House in Edgartown.

The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank reported revenues of $75,470 for the business week ending on Friday, August 16, 2013. The land bank receives its funds from a two per cent fee charged on many Vineyard real estate transactions.

During the last hour of the 152nd Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Fair on Sunday, a drizzly rain began to patter the ground. The exhibit hall closed and the animals in the barn and fiber tent were loaded into their trailers. Someone played Taps on a bugle. But the midway remained open and active, and rides still zipped and zoomed, flashing their colorful lights. Fairgoers continued to roam the booth area, eating corn on the cob, burgers and cotton candy. The fair comes only once a year, after all, and it was only a little bit of rain.

Forty years ago Dr. Karl Skoreki trained in nephrology in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. During his time there, he noticed that many members of the same family were contracting kidney disease, a condition that was poorly understood at the time. During his career Dr. Skorecki continued to study genetic predisposition to the disease. He and other researchers have since determined that the illness, which can devolve into kidney failure, disproportionately affects African Americans, who are four to five times more likely to contract the disease and to die from its effects.

In 2007 the town of Chilmark, the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank and the Howard Hillman family announced a three-way land swap that was designed to save a historic house, open up a new conservation corridor and create more affordable housing up-Island.

Black Americans on average die four years before White Americans, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistic released last month. “When America gets a cold, poor black folk get pneumonia,” said Dr. David Williams, professor of public health at Harvard, in a panel discussion last week.

Politics are poisoned by bitter partisanship, economic disparities between whites and minorities are widening and trust between these groups seems to be eroding, complicating efforts to bridge America’s divisions. These were among the many observations by panelists at the annual Hutchins Forum Thursday evening in Edgartown.

Walk along the edge of a meadow, the perimeter of a farm, or into a clearing in a deciduous forest on Martha’s Vineyard, and one plant you can almost count on finding is the black cherry tree. The black cherry, or Prunus serotina, is native to the Island and a vitally important source of food and shelter for a remarkable number of animals.