MISQUAH — Vern’s birthday came off Thursday at the usual table at the Daybreak, and I am pleased to report that everyone came at ten and acted surprised, and that Vern acted surprised at our acting surprised, and that the whole performance went so smoothly you would think this town rehearses it annually, which of course it does. The cake was chocolate. The age remains unprinted. Vern asked me to note that he was “genuinely very surprised,” and to print it in quotation marks, and I have, and we understand each other.

Pat put the candles on the house, which she does every year and every year pretends is a one-time thing, and the singing was led, uninvited, by the window table, who are reliable in these matters and not entirely on key, which is how you know it’s from the heart. Vern blew out the candles in one go and declined to share the wish, though anyone who has heard him on the subject of the walleye this July can guess its coordinates.

Now, the vegetables, because it has begun in earnest. Tuesday night, under cover of dark, a grocery sack containing four zucchini the size of rolled newspapers appeared on our porch. No note. No witness. The blotter has the details, and I have my suspicions, and the suspicions have gardens, and that is all I will say in print. Per my own published etiquette, we kept the squash, said thank you to the night air, and did not retaliate. There is a loaf of bread in my freezer now that will be somebody’s problem by August, delivered warm, with eye contact, the way civilized people do it.

Gentler news: the dishes are going home. If July’s first current carried casseroles toward the Aune porch, its second is carrying the dishes back — washed, stacked, and riding along whenever anyone heads that direction. Ruth herself left the library Friday with an armload of them (see News), which means the loop is closing the way it should: food goes out in a crisis, dishes come home when it passes, and everyone checks the bottoms for the masking-tape names, because half this town’s bakeware has been circulating since the Reagan administration and possession, in the casserole economy, means nothing.

The corn, by the way, is close. I have seen the tassels. Two weeks, maybe less, and then it will be sweet corn every night and no one will complain, because there are exactly two July emergencies in Misquah — too much zucchini and not yet enough corn — and we are about to trade the one for the other, on schedule, like always.