Asher and Shyfra Scharf were ready for their trip. Their Uzbek visas were current, though they hadn’t set foot in the country for more than 60 years. All they needed now was a reason to return. They didn’t know how or when the call would come, nor did they have a reason to believe it would come at all. But still, they waited.

They say bad things come in threes. In the fall of 2008, Rosie Roberts and her sister were both diagnosed with cancer. Their elderly mother was ailing and near death. For Ms. Roberts’s family, three bad things seemed like plenty to deal with at once. But the bad news kept coming.

Ms. Roberts was notified shortly after her first lumpectomy that the procedure had failed. Two hours later, her mother died. With her family in mourning, her sister still in treatment, and Ms. Roberts preparing herself for another surgery, what she really needed was support.

The selectmen predicted it would be a noncontroversial annual town meeting this year in Aquinnah, and they were almost right.

After long debate on Tuesday night, voters could not agree on terms for selling a town-owned piece of land, and the end result was that the land will not be sold — at least for now.

Longtime Aquinnah moderator Walter Delaney remembers, years ago, spotting an unexpected visitor sneak into a town meeting. It was a warm summer night, and he had just gaveled the meeting to a close when a skunk strolled through the front doors and settled in beneath a chair in the back of the room. Calmly, the moderator directed the other meeting attendees out the side door, careful not to alert them to their curious guest and spark a potentially smelly panic.