MISQUAH — You can tell how close the fair is by how little anyone says. In June the tables trade recipes. In July they trade advice. By the second week of August the kitchens have gone quiet and the Klatch has become a room full of women drinking coffee and volunteering nothing, and I want to be clear that this is the most companionable silence in Minnesota. We all know exactly what everyone else is doing. We simply decline to confirm it.

What I can report: the lids are gone from the shelf at Tim’s, Marlys sold the last two boxes Wednesday and has been insufferable about her forecast, and somebody at this table has done something with a beet that she believes will be discussed at the fair for years. She has said nothing about it. She has been saying nothing about it very loudly since Saturday.

Saturday was the funeral, and the Ladies’ Aid fed what Pastor Lindholm estimated at two hundred and I estimate at more, in the basement, with eleven kinds of bar on the long table and ham enough for a third seating that never came because the second one didn’t leave. That is the other thing August kitchens do, and they do it without a schedule and without being asked. I counted four pans that arrived after the lunch had already started, brought by women who had heard the line was long. Nobody thanked them out loud, because you don’t.

The envelope with the sixty-one guesses is in the coffee tin behind the register at the Daybreak. Pat taped it in front of us. Two people at this table wrote down the same lake and have not spoken since, which is a joke, mostly. The recipe on this page is my mother’s refrigerator pickles, which are not fair pickles, are not entered in anything, and can be made this afternoon by a person who has decided at the last minute that she needs pickles. There is one of you every year. Sigrid’s stars are next door and she says Wednesday night is the night. It has been, as ever, quite a week at the tables.