OUR VIEW — There are six weeks until the Fourth of July, and a town that wishes to look its best on its biggest day would do well to spend them on the small, dull work nobody notices until it is missing. Paint the lines before the parade.

We mean it literally, and otherwise. The crosswalk by the school has faded to a rumor. The center line on Main Street, down which the parade will roll, has worn thin. The bleachers at the ballfield have a board everyone knows about and steps over. None of these is urgent. All of them are exactly the kind of thing that gets deferred because it is not urgent — until the deferral becomes the town’s settled condition, and a community that has stopped doing its small maintenance has begun, quietly, to come apart at a speed no one can quite see.

The Fourth is a useful deadline, and we should use it — not because the visitors will notice the fresh paint, for they will not, but because we will, and because the doing of small public work in the weeks before a celebration is itself a kind of celebration: a town getting ready, together, to be seen. The same hands that will line the parade route can paint it first. The same week that fills the fireworks fund can spare the can of yellow paint and the afternoon to put it down.

We are not above a grand gesture; the fireworks over Big Pelican are nothing if not grand. But a town is held together far more by its dull maintenance than by its grand gestures — by the line repainted, the board replaced, the hydrant flushed on schedule. Do the small things now, while there is a deadline to do them by. Paint the lines. The parade, and the year behind it, will go the better for it.