Up in West Tisbury, past the airport but before the Mill Pond, is a small building. A part of both Island and national history, it serves as a social and cultural melting pot and a way to track economic trends. It is the Lillian Manter Memorial Hostel and, on a recent Tuesday morning shortly after 10 a.m., every bed was booked, but not a guest was around. The hot July sun was out and the groups of bikers and summer campers, the travellers from Canada and Germany and the friends shacked up in the one private room were all off exploring the Island.

It is the last Tuesday in July. The asparagus is long gone. Sugar snap peas have departed. Strawberry season has come and gone. But still there is much to look forward to. There are blueberries for sale and red, orange and even purple tomatoes ripening on Vineyard vines. There are cows to be milked, rains to be thankful for, sweet corn to eat by the dozen. August is just around the corner.

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Tonight, Rose Abrahamson will celebrate what she warns could be her last art opening. “I’ll be 87 in October,” she said by way of an invitation to come and preview her new paintings and collage work. “How much longer can I work?”

Robynn Murray stood alone in the kitchen. Bread in the toaster, she twirled a butter knife in a tub of Nutella and looked out across the brown Chilmark fields of North Road. She spread the warm bread thick; stuck the knife back in the jar. “I got these when I got back from Iraq,” she said. She licked a crumb of toast from the corner of her mouth and pointed to the two guns tattooed on her chest, their barrels facing each other.

Prices at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market have long caused shoppers to go into sticker shock when reaching for a bouquet of sunflowers or a bushel of local fingerling potatoes. Bargains have always been few and far between, yet customers continued to arrive before the gates open at nine to snatch up the best of the Vineyard’s hand-picked local produce.