It is Old Home Day season in New Hampshire and in Hancock, the centerpiece is the Fire Department chicken barbecue. Fifteen dollars gets you a half chicken, potato salad and cole slaw, a roll, slice of watermelon and a can of soda.

Fire Department volunteers pitch the tent and set up the grill on Friday, then start cooking late Saturday morning in order to begin serving by four in the afternoon. Afterward, they clean the whole thing up so that apart from the tent that will still be standing in the morning, the place is spotless. Like it never happened.

Four hundred and fifty dinners handed out, with kids and dogs running around and a band playing in the background.

Like the Fire Department doesn’t do enough already. Shouldn’t we be cooking for them? Where did the volunteer fire department barbecue come from, anyway? Growing up, we used to look forward to the Labor Day weekend chicken barbecue hosted by the volunteer fire department in my grandparents’ town in upstate New York.

Later, living in western New York, a similar hoedown, also around Labor Day, took place in our community south of Buffalo, though in this case it was catered by Chiavetta’s, a family business that has been grilling chicken in backyards and parking lots for 70 years relying on their secret, amazing barbecue marinade. (It’s available online. Good idea to always have a batch around.)

I am not sure it is clear to anyone when fire departments got into the chicken barbecue business. They have been going on for years to help raise money, but at $15 a plate, probably the only ones making real money are the chicken farmers, or – more likely – the grocery wholesalers. This time of year, they sell a lot of chicken.

But nothing says community. or Old Home Day, like a volunteer fire department and chicken barbecue. You can separate them, of course. You can need the fire department and need chicken barbecue. Together, however, they bring everyone to the table, generally celebrating the waning days of summer – the harvest season – which is why many of them take place around Labor Day weekend.

Except that somewhere along the line, Labor Day weekend was decommissioned as the official end of summer in New England. Now, students are pulled back to school the last week of August, rather than the first week of September. In our district, that will be the 28th, meaning three days of school, followed by the long weekend. Frankly, it does not feel like the sort of process improvement paying big educational dividends downstream.

I go on this rant every year at this time. Consider what many of us remember about Labor Day, which included parades, road races and miles of traffic on the highways, the clearest indication that it was time to for everyone to get back to it. Labor Day weekend gave us closure – the last few nights of shrinking daylight hours to be outside after dinner rather than in our rooms doing homework.

We were filled with anticipation and some regret as we headed to the volunteer fire department’s chicken barbecue. But there we found our neighbors, caught up on their summer stories, played some games, ate some watermelon and came away ready.

All of which was worth waiting for. All of which was brought to term by our local volunteer fire fighters. And quite a few chickens.

Thank you.

Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays on rural life. He is a retired media and advertising sales executive, and former chef/owner, with his wife, of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. Reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with all his musings at jarviscoffin.com.