MISQUAH — The sweet corn arrived Saturday, as it does, all at once and by back road. By eight in the morning there were three stands open on the county roads with folding tables, hand counts, and honor boxes; by noon the first pickups were making the rounds with tailgates down; and by supper the season’s first universal judgment was in. The corn is good. The corn is always good. The town confirms this every year with the seriousness of a finding that could have gone the other way.

Saturday’s date puts the crop nine days behind the earliest sweet corn on record — July 19, 1976, a mark that survives half a century later and appears again in this edition’s From the Files, where it is still described in the present tense. Nobody this year was chasing it. “The corn comes when it comes,” said one grower, who was twelve in 1976 and remembers the fuss. “The record is safe. The record was always safe.”

The smoke hung over the whole business and changed none of it. Pickers were out at six under a red sun, the advisory notwithstanding — “you can’t advise corn,” one explained — and customers reported that the haze gave the stands “a campfire quality,” which most decided to enjoy quietly and not examine.

The Paulson stand on County 12, the oldest of them all, opened Saturday at its usual hour with its usual hand-painted dozen price, which rounds down. It opened four days after the death of Arvid Paulson, who built the stand and ran it for sixty summers, and whose family opened it anyway, on time, because the corn was ready. His obituary appears in this edition. The honor box was full by noon, and more than one envelope in it, the family reports, contained a good deal more than the price of corn.