MISQUAH — The Fourth is the one day of the year the whole town eats together — not in the church basement, not in careful shifts, but all at once, out of doors, off a long line of folding tables in the park — and it is, for exactly that reason, the most diplomatically complex meal on the calendar, and the one most likely to end in a quiet conversation about somebody’s potato salad.

I will say it plainly, as a public service: the potato salad sat too long. It does every single year. It sits in the sun on the table between the bars and the bean hotdish, and it is wonderful at noon and a calculated risk by two and a genuine open question by four, and every year somebody’s cousin from the Cities asks whether it’s “still good,” and every year the rest of us, who were raised here and have the constitutions to prove it, say “it’s fine” and mean, precisely, “it’s fine for us.”

The Fourth picnic is a potluck, which means it is also a census, a competition, and a map of the town’s kitchens, fully legible to anyone who knows the code. You can tell whose bean hotdish that is from clear across the park. You know which bars came from which house, and which were, scandalously, store-bought. You know the Sorensens always bring far too much and the Hagens always bring exactly enough, and that somebody, every year, brings three bags of chips and calls it a contribution — and is forgiven, because it is the Fourth, and forgiveness is on the menu too.

Vern, of course, grilled, as the men do, gathered around the one grill in a loose standing congress of supervision, each man holding a spatula, none of them entirely in charge, producing in the end a great quantity of hamburgers and a noticeably smaller quantity of correctly cooked ones. I said nothing. It was the Fourth. A woman picks her battles, and the Fourth is a day for peace — even over a gray hamburger, even when she could have told him, and chose not to, and is telling you instead, which is its own form of mercy.

But here is the real thing, the thing worth saying out loud just once a year: for all the gentle judgment of it, everyone eats. The newcomer and the old-timer, the family that is struggling this year and the family that isn’t, the cousin from the Cities and the man who brought the chips — they all stand at the same tables and fill the same paper plates, and for one long afternoon the town is simply the town, together, out of doors, eating slightly dangerous potato salad in the sun. That is worth a stomachache. It is worth a good deal more than that. I’ll see you there next year. Bring something cold, and bring it covered.