Between white picket fences, the cobbled sidewalks are packed with people in crazy hats, waving the Stars and Stripes. A Land Rover carries the officers of the Edgartown Yacht Club, gold buttons on their navy coats and hats. A colonial marching band stomps by, and then the Irish and the Scots in their contrasting kilts. Martha’s Vineyard’s Returning Peace Corps Volunteers get a special welcome for their service; they are gray-haired, athletic, waving the flags of their host countries from decades past. The Peace Council’s float reminds us that war is not the answer. A rat, taller than the ante-bellum houses, passes on a truck, advertising pest control. The residents of a group home are pushed past in wheelchairs, faces painted as clowns, looking shocked to me. Fire trucks, one for each town. Then my own kid on the back of a truck, throwing candy.

Later, the beach. First a natural display in the west, the vast disk slipping out of sight beneath thick strokes of yellow, orange, and crimson, while the placid ocean seems like gel lit from within, lapping the sand. Anything else would be anticlimactic, but as the sky darkens, the anticlimax comes: first, illegal bottle-rockets popping overhead, then the professional show in Edgartown and a matching one to the left in Oak Bluffs. From the invisible shore opposite, little smokey puffs and starbursts just above the horizon: Cape Cod saluting the Vineyard.

(I had a much more cynical take on a Memorial Day parade in 2010.)