COZY TOWN — The footbridge over the duck pond, closed since a particularly ambitious beaver incident in June of last year, reopened Saturday morning to a crowd of nearly two hundred residents, forty-one dogs and one llama whose presence remains unexplained.

Mayor Tilly Crumb, wielding the ceremonial garden shears that have opened every civic project since 1974, declared the bridge “the finest fourteen feet of walking this town has ever produced.” The renovation cost $18,400, of which $2,310 was raised through three bake sales organized by the Cozy Town Preservation Society. The remainder came from the town’s Rainy Day Fund, which the treasurer noted has never once been used for actual rain.

The new bridge features cedar planking, a bench at its midpoint, and a small brass plaque honoring Gerald, the beaver responsible for the original closure. Gerald has since relocated upstream, where officials describe his work as “ongoing but no longer our problem.”

“We wanted something that would last,” said Harold Pinch, the carpenter who led the project. “But also something Gerald couldn’t chew through in an afternoon. Those two goals turned out to be the same goal.”

By noon, the bench had already hosted its first nap, taken by retired postmaster Eugenia Blett, who awoke to applause and briefly believed it was for her.