Three weeks later, the city hosted its annual Lakeside Festival. Families crowded the shoreline while officials welcomed everyone from the stage. I walked along the path toward them carrying my worn canvas bag, and inside it, a folded certificate I’d found while cleaning out that same bag the week before, one I’d genuinely forgotten I still had.
Twelve years earlier, the parks department had nominated me for the city’s volunteer recognition program, and I’d been formally designated, in a resolution passed by the parks board itself, as a Lifetime Community Steward for the lake district — a title that came with a small certificate I’d stuck in my bag and never thought about again, because the work itself had always mattered more to me than the paper.
I hadn’t remembered the specific language until I read it again that morning.
“The Parks Board designates this individual a Lifetime Community Steward in recognition of sustained, uncompensated service to the city’s park system, entitled to standing invitation and recognition at all official parks events for the duration of their continued residency in the city.”
I walked up near the stage during a lull in the welcome remarks and showed the certificate to one of the council members standing nearby, someone who’d actually been on the board the year it passed. She remembered it immediately, remembered the sunrise litter cleanups and the feeder refills that had quietly kept that lake district looking cared for long before “volunteer coordination” became anyone’s official job title.
She asked, right there, whether the current supervisor had known about the designation before deciding to replace me with “fresh energy.” He hadn’t. He’d inherited a volunteer roster without ever being told which names on it carried an actual standing commitment from the city itself.
The council member didn’t make a scene of it, but she did make sure, before the festival ended, that the supervisor understood the designation was still active and still binding on how the parks department treated me. He found me by the bird feeders that same afternoon, apologized plainly, and asked if I’d be willing to come back — not instead of the newer volunteers, but alongside them, teaching them the routes and the reasons behind them, the way nobody had ever gotten around to teaching him.
I still arrive before sunrise most mornings. The geese still call across the water the same way they always have. Sixteen years taught me that quiet, steady work doesn’t always announce itself loudly enough for a new supervisor to notice right away. It just took one old certificate, tucked in a canvas bag, to remind the city of something it had decided, formally, a long time ago, and simply forgotten to pass along.