Editor’s Note: Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States, elected on a platform of change, on Jan. 20, 2009. He took the oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as the country confronted its gravest set of circumstances in at least a generation.

A year into the Obama presidency, the Gazette invited leaders in their fields to write about the changes still needed, nationally as well as locally.

The skin drum in Tobias Vanderhoop’s hand was small, but the sound it made was huge, echoing off the venerable redbrick buildings of Harvard Yard as if calling forth the sound of other, older Native American drums that might once have filled that space.

Zachariah Howwoswee Jr. was the last Aquinnah preacher to speak to his flock in his native language, Wôpanâak. By the early 19th century, there were few parishioners left who could understand him. Forced to give his sermons mostly in English, he would revert to Wôpanâak to make his most particular points to his flock. At these times, an observer wrote, “he would cry, and they would cry.”

The high stone wall curves around the small gray house as if enfolding it in a protective embrace. When the winter winds blew, hard and damp, across the north shore of the Island, those thoughtfully-placed granite stones shielded the house, and the people within it. It’s so easy to imagine the Tiltons listening to the wind moaning in the chimney piece as the sponge for the next day’s bread worked on the hearth.

Here’s what I love most about my town: its edges. In three directions, Vineyard Haven ends abruptly, as a town should, surrendering, gracefully and completely, to farms and fields and watery expanses of harbor and salt ponds. Within minutes, you can leave town behind and be lost on a woody trail, eye to eye with a ewe or out on the whitecaps with a seagull. Because of these edges and what lies beyond them, it smells good here. The breezes that blow through my kitchen window mostly carry briny scents, tangy with ocean.