A Town Rings Thirteen Times at Two O’Clock

 

Cedar Valley News
June 29, 2026
A Town Rings Thirteen Times at Two O’Clock
By Teresa Nikas

Last year, on the Fourth of July, at two o’clock in the afternoon, the bells started.

I was on the porch. I heard the church first, the big bell at First Methodist, slow and even. Then the school bell, smaller and higher. Then, from somewhere down the block, a hand bell, the kind a teacher rang to call children in from the yard. A dog answered one of them. A screen door opened. Up and down the street, people stopped what they were doing and stood still, the way you do when you are not sure whether to listen or join in.

Most of Cedar Valley does not know why the bells ring at two o’clock. I did not know myself until a few years ago, when I looked.

In June of 1963, Congress passed a resolution. It asked the country to ring its bells every Fourth of July, at two in the afternoon, thirteen times, one for each colony. President Kennedy put his name to it and asked Americans to ring freedom bells. He was able to keep the appointment only once. He was gone by November. The bells have rung at two o’clock on the Fourth, in towns up and down the country, every year since, for a man who heard them once.

I have been thinking about why a small thing like this lasts when bigger things do not.

The Fourth of July is the loudest day we have. There are fireworks, which you watch. There are parades, which you watch. There is, most years now, an argument the country is having with itself, which you also mostly watch, from a chair, on a screen. The Fourth has become a thing we attend.

The bells are different. You do not watch a bell. You ring one. The church sexton climbs the stairs and pulls the rope. The principal props the school door and lets a sixth-grader do the honors. The woman three houses down takes her father’s hand bell off the shelf and rings it from her own front step. Nobody is performing for anybody. There is no stage. There is only the ringing, and the count of thirteen, and then quiet.

I think this is the whole of it. The fireworks ask you to look up. The bells ask you to take part.

And the bells ask nothing else. They do not ask who you voted for. They do not ask what you think about anything. A bell has no opinion. It rings the same note for the family on the hill and the family behind on the rent, for the veteran and the war protester, for the people who agree about everything and the people who agree about nothing. For one minute, at two o’clock, a town spending the rest of the year disagreeing makes a single sound together, and does not have to settle a thing to do it.

We do not have much like this left. We have a great many ways to be in the same country without ever being in the same room. The bells are an hour, on one day, when the room is the whole town, and the only thing asked of you is to make a little noise on purpose, at the same time as your neighbors, for no reason you could explain to a stranger.

This year the country turns two hundred fifty. There will be more fireworks than usual, more arguing than usual, and the loud Fourth will be very loud. The quiet one is still there, underneath, at two o’clock, the same as it was the year Kennedy rang it and the year after he could not.

So here is what I would tell a friend at my kitchen table.

On Saturday, a few minutes before two, find something in the house to ring. The bell on the porch. The bell in the church. A school bell, a dinner bell, a brass bell from the back of a drawer. If you have none, a pot and a spoon will do, and a child will be more than glad to help.

Then, at two o’clock, ring it. Thirteen times. Count them.

And listen for your neighbors.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. If you ring something at two o’clock on Saturday, tell us what it was, and whether your neighbors rang back. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the 1963 resolution, President Kennedy, and the Independence Day bell-ringing tradition described in this editorial are real.