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before, save for hummingbirds. But it was not a hummingbird. It was nota finch or a warbler or a wren. I’d never seen a bird like it, in the woods or meadows or in a book. Kate looked at the bird and smiled. The bird sang a liquid, silvery little phrase that was so clear and so limpid it seemed without source, trilling in the air for an instant and evaporating without a trace. (Afterward, whenever Kate and I talked about her first time feeding the birds, we ended our recollections by talking about the little yellow bird and the little silver phrase it sang that neither of us could have said quite for certain we had actually heard, but for the fact that the other seemed to have heard it as well.) The bird remained on the tip of Kate’s finger for another moment and whirred back into the reeds. I tried to sight it with my binoculars but could not find it again.
    We crossed the boardwalk, walked up the log steps in the woods and into the milkweed field, which was full of swallows zinging around catching insects on the wing in the sunset.
    Kate rubbed her arm and said, “Oh, man, I must have fed like a hundred birds. That pretty little yellow one was the best. I couldn’t even feel it on my fingers.”
    W HEN I WAS A kid, we followed the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War memorial in the center of the village, down Main Street, to the cemetery. The veterans and cops and firefighters and dens and packs of Boy and Girl Scouts and the high school marching band formed a semicircle around a portable podium with a built-in microphone and speaker, which was never loud enough, set up once a year for this occasion in front of a file of uniform headstones belongingto a group of Revolutionary War veterans, each with a small United States flag poked into the ground next to it. An officer in the army or navy reserves would give a speech, which, translated through the podium speaker, sounded like a garbled distillation of every Memorial Day speech ever given in every small town in the country, the words of which were not as important as the spirit in which they were delivered. When the day was sunny and blustery, the wind would pop and roar through the speaker along with the speech. When it was overcast or rainy, the speech would sound nearly subterranean, as if it were channeled through the officer at the podium from one of the soldiers in the ground behind him. Villagers sat on the hill overlooking the podium or meandered among the headstones, searching for the oldest dates, or stood behind the crowd with toddlers in strollers. Kids ran around playing tag or hide-and-go-seek and were shushed by whatever nearby adults when they squealed too loudly. After the speech, the first trumpeter in the marching band played taps. When he was finished, the second trumpeter played it again, from behind a maple tree at the back of the cemetery. Three veterans from the National Guard fired three rounds of blanks from their rifles and the Cub Scouts scrummed at their feet for the shells. The parade re-formed, the drum line started a march, and the procession headed back to town, where it ended with another short speech in front of the town hall.
    I played drums in the high school band and dreaded the Memorial Day parade because I had to spend the day among everyone I knew dressed in a shiny blue polyester suit, with a white sash, white bucks, and a blue plume sticking up fromthe crown of my white vinyl shako. After high school, I never thought about the parade until I moved back to Enon and had Kate.
    Kate was born in November, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, but the next May, when she was six months old, I found myself taking her to the parade and following alongside the band with her in her carriage. I took her to the parade every year until she was old enough to join the Brownies, after which she marched in the parade, and I followed alongside her troop, taking pictures. She didn’t continue into Girl Scouts because by then she was preoccupied