MISQUAH — First Lutheran Church has set June 7 for its spring lutefisk and meatball supper, the Ladies’ Aid announced this week, and First Methodist has separately announced that it will, on that particular evening, be busy — a scheduling development the two congregations have perfected into something between a courtesy and a standoff.

The supper, a fixture of the church calendar since 1951, will run from 4:30 to 7 in the basement on Second Avenue, with the usual arrangement of cod cured in lye for the faithful and meatballs for everyone else, including, as ever, a reliable contingent from Sacred Heart who turn out for the meatballs and walk past the fish “with no apology and no shame,” as one Aid member put it, “and we love them anyway, mostly.”

The Methodists’ announced unavailability is traditional and, both sides agree, for the best. “We don’t schedule against each other,” explained Aid president Marlys Tollefson. “There are only so many basements and only so many Tuesdays—or in this case Saturdays—and only so much appetite in one town. They have their pie social, we have our lutefisk, and we have learned, over about seventy years, to stay out of each other’s way on the calendar, which is its own form of fellowship.”

Tickets will be $14 for adults, $7 for children, and free for anyone over 90, of whom the supper draws a small and honored number each year. Proceeds go, as they have gone for fourteen years, to the basement roof fund, which Treasurer Vern Dahlquist again described as “closer than it’s ever been,” a phrase the bulletin notes he has now used, without evident irony, since 2012.