MISQUAH — Sign-ups for the summer recreation program opened this week at the fire hall, rec director Lori Dahl confirmed, with the season’s offerings unchanged from a formula the town has found, over many years, no compelling reason to improve: tee-ball for the youngest, swim lessons at the Loon Lake public landing on weekday mornings, and an afternoon block listed on the registration form only, and accurately, as “general supervised outdoors.”

Longtime parents understand the last to mean exactly what it says, and value it precisely for refusing to pretend to be more: a responsible adult, a stretch of shoreline and ballfield, a cooler of water, and several unstructured hours of childhood conducted without a curriculum, a theme, or a worksheet to take home. “We tried calling it other things over the years,” Dahl said. “Nature Exploration. Outdoor Skills Development. We printed up nice forms. Nobody was fooled, least of all the kids. It’s kids, outside, watched, until supper. That’s the program. After twenty years I’ll tell you it’s a good program, maybe the best one we run, and the honesty is the whole reason it works — nobody’s disappointed, because nobody was promised anything but an afternoon.”

Forms are due Friday at the fire hall. The program asks that each child bring a water bottle, a towel, and “a willingness,” and notes, in a line added to the form a few summers back and kept ever since, that swim lessons will be moved to alternate mornings on “bear days,” of which the season has now produced at least one, with the summer young and the dumpsters, as ever, an open question. Tee-ball begins the week after the Fourth; the swim lessons run through August, taught, as they have been for years, by a rotating pair of certified high-schoolers who were themselves, not so long ago, the kids in the water.