MISQUAH — Well, we had our parade. I will not say more than the front of the paper already says about who was on the flatbed and what it meant, except this, from the corner table where I have sat through a great many Saturdays and watched this town be itself: it was a good one, and a good one is not nothing, and you should not let anybody tell you it is. The walleye was crooked. The bars ran out at 6:40, which I had predicted to the minute and was not thanked for predicting. Lloyd Bunde held a corner of the banner and did not say much, which for Lloyd is practically an oration. That is about as right as a day gets up here, and I have seen the wrong kind, so I know the difference.

It was also the solstice, the longest light of the whole year, and I sat out on the back step until nearly ten o’clock just to spend it, because you cannot save the light but you can at least refuse to waste it, and refusing to waste it is most of what I have learned in seventy-some years. There is a particular kind of evening in late June when the lake goes flat and gold and the swallows are working low over the water and you cannot, for the actual life of you, remember what February felt like in your hands. Bank it. That is my advice and it is free, which is the right price for advice. Take the picture in your head and file it somewhere you will be able to find it later. You are going to need it in February, and February, I promise you, does not accept excuses and does not care that you were busy.

Now. The rhubarb. I know. I have given away four bags this week, and the patch behind the house has not noticed and will, I am increasingly certain, outlive us all and most of you. If you are tired of cake — and you are allowed to be tired of cake, I will not report you — stew it down with a little sugar and a little orange zest and put it over ice cream, or over a bowl of plain nothing, or over the kind of slow gray morning that needs something tart to wake it up. My recipe this week, though, is for the bars that travel, because it is potluck season and it will be potluck season until the snow flies, and a person should have one bar she can carry to a thing in a pan she won’t cry over leaving behind.

Vern says the fish he caught this week was a wall-hanger. The fish Vern catches is always, reliably, by Tuesday, a wall-hanger; I have the cooler receipt, and I have my doubts, and I have been married to the man going on forty-some years, and I know exactly which of those three things to trust. Mind the loon chicks. Slow your boat past the north end, the way Dorothy asked, because Dorothy is right. Save a little of this light somewhere you can reach it in the dark months. And I will see you at the Fourth — there is, I am reliably informed, a boat parade now, a thing this town apparently decided it needed in a church basement in December, and which I intend to watch from a lawn chair on dry land, with a bar in one hand and a lemonade in the other, like a sensible woman who has watched enough parades to know how best to do it.