MISQUAH — There were, by the committee’s careful count, thirty-seven of them on the flatbed Saturday, and there is a temptation, in a town this size, to feel you must already know all thirty-seven. You do. They are the kids you taught and coached, the ones who fixed your furnace and sang in the choir and brought the second-best hotdish to the funeral and stayed after to do the dishes. They have been your neighbors all along, sitting three pews up and two stools down, and on Saturday they got a parade. That is the entire news, and it is enough.

It is fair to say not everyone in Misquah arrived at this parade at the same time, or by the same road, and we are not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending is beneath the occasion. Some came easily and some came slowly and a few good and honest people are still somewhere on the way, working it through the way people up here work things through, which is quietly, at the kitchen table, over time. That is all right. This is a town that took sixty-nine years and counting to decide about a single stop sign; we are not, by temperament or climate, a people who hurry our hearts. What matters is not whether a person sprinted to the curb. What matters is who showed up, and on Saturday, standing along Main from the Co-op to the park, the answer was: just about everybody, and a few who surprised themselves.

A twelve-foot rainbow walleye is a strange flag to march behind. We are aware of this. It is also, on reflection, exactly our flag — homemade in a pole barn, a little crooked, the plywood seams still showing if you know where to look, built by hand by a neighbor who happened to have the lumber and the Saturday. You could not mistake it for any other town’s Pride, and that is the whole point of it. Misquah did Pride the way Misquah does every single thing it has ever decided was worth doing: it made a fish, it brought the bars, it argued briefly about the route, and it showed up, in numbers, on a Saturday, for its own.

We will say one more thing and then leave it, because the day did not need a speech and neither does this. The thirty-seven did not become our neighbors on Saturday. They were our neighbors on Friday, and last winter, and twenty years ago at the lake. All that changed Saturday is that we said so, out loud, on Main Street, where everyone could hear it — and it turns out that saying a true thing out loud, after years of everyone quietly knowing it, is its own kind of homecoming. So to the thirty-seven, and to the ones not yet counted who will ride next year, and the year after: we were glad to see every one of you up on that flatbed. We are gladder still that you are ours, and always were. Welcome on the Chain. There was never, not for one minute, any question.