MISQUAH — There are two sounds that tell you it is the middle of July in Misquah, and this week we got both. The first is the trombone. Band camp opened Monday out at Lakeside, and by Wednesday you could hear it from the water tower, the way you can every year — a hopeful, uncertain brass that is not yet music but is trying very hard to be, and will be, we are assured, by August.

Hannah Moe has the band this summer, her first, and I for one am rooting for her, because directing thirty children with trombones in July is the kind of work that builds character in a person whether or not they asked for any. Vern says it sounds like a moose in distress. I told Vern that Hannah Moe sat in my kitchen as a girl and is a lovely young woman and he can keep his moose to himself, and he said he meant it as a compliment to the moose, and we left it there.

The second sound is quieter and more sinister, and it is the sound of the first zucchini being set down on a porch after dark. It has not started yet. But the gardens are turning, and every gardener in this town knows what is coming, which is more zucchini than any human family can eat, bake, freeze, or give away by honest means. What follows is the season of the anonymous vegetable — the bag left on the step, the box left in the unlocked car, the loaf of zucchini bread pressed on you by someone who has clearly made forty of them and is desperate.

The etiquette here is delicate and I will state it plainly, as a public service. If someone gives you zucchini, you take it, and you say thank you, and you do not ask if there is more, because there is always more. You do not give it back. You do not regift it to the person who gave it to you. And under no circumstances do you leave your own zucchini on the porch of a person you know to be growing zucchini, because that is not sharing, that is a declaration, and this town has enough of those going on down at the city hall tonight without starting one over squash.

Speaking of which, we are all invited to Vern Dahlquist’s birthday Thursday at the usual table at the Daybreak, and I would remind everyone to come at ten and act surprised. He knows. He knows we know he knows. Come anyway. That is what the table is for, and it is a good deal quieter than the trombones.