On the Vineyard, it is March that seems most cruel. The weather is mercurial, blowing hard and cold one day, then providing a tease of real spring a few days later. Goodbye snow, hello snowdrops is the much-embraced rallying cry, but then the forecast turns again.

So it is with our emotions, which are lifted one day to be dropped the next. The heartwarming story last week of a dog rescued from the icy waters of Katama Bay offered a moment of happiness. The tragic loss this week of a member of our small year-round community in a house fire brings only sorrow.

To be sure, there are wondrous harbingers of spring — the return of the osprey, the mating call of the pinkletink, and the classic rock backbeat of carpenters resuming work on job sites all over the Island. But for many there is also the stress of making meager winter reserves last just a little longer. The month of March means almost there but not quite as the Island’s economy is still nearly as quiet as a T-shirt shop on Main street in January.

An article in today’s Gazette profiles Betty Burton, who in addition to being in charge of adult programming at the Vineyard Haven library has for the past 23 years made it her mission to help feed the hungry of Martha’s Vineyard. That the demand for her work rises each year reveals once again, she says, that the Island’s reputation as just a place for the wealthy is a false one.

Statistics from a national food bank network called Feeding America suggests that more than 1,500 people on the Island suffer from what is called food insecurity, which roughly translates to not knowing where the next meal is coming from. For many years Dukes County ranked as the poorest county in the state. But statistics are impersonal. Visit any one of the community suppers held each winter by houses of worship and witness real people in need of real food. Or as Ms. Burton says, your neighbors.

The cold winter months are a nuisance for many, a dark time of the mind for others, and for those who can, a time to flee to warmer climes. But Betty Burton and others like her know that a significant portion of our population has a more basic problem: they are hungry.

Why go down this dark path as the sun begins to shine and beckon us all to the beach and barbecues, now just months away?

Because annual town meetings are closer still, just a few weeks away, where a host of issues will be debated as they are each year. There will be articles to raise tax rates, allocate money to schools, fire stations and the police departments, to roads, refuse districts and veterans’ monuments, to school playgrounds, community preservation and numerous studies on a host of important issues. And there will also be choices to make on affordable housing.

March can make it hard to feel generous. Grumpy from too much snow, angry about the cost of weather-related repairs, worried about whether the summer earning season will bring enough, and there’s a temptation to retrench, to think about one’s own problems.

But lack of food and shelter, those most basic of needs, are problems that we as a community must share. When discussing the future of this Island, they should always have a place at the table.