The temperature is still soaring with a high of 93, as it has been for the last three days and will be for the next week at least. Being Michigan, it doesn’t cool down at night. (I am so thankful for air conditioning, but only in the last 4 years!)
Since our Lake Michigan has lost much of it’s beach in this area, that’s not an option. Inland land lakes are too warm and buggy. No parades or fireworks this year. Most people we have talked to are not doing anything this holiday weekend.
Sometimes we don’t do anything because we just can’t! Sometimes we just don’t want to. In this day when we seem to get our significance from doing, instead of being, it’s sometimes hard just to sit still and enjoy the peace and quiet, when our mind remembers the livelier Fourth of July parades, fireworks, and Bar-B-cue with friends and family. There is always a bit of loss for those who have enjoyed this holiday.
My memories of the 4th of July were not nearly as exciting as my husbands. For people from a non-farming community, vacation and fun in the summer is an entitlement. For him it was a parade, going to the community park for tractor pulls, going to the lake with friends , fireworks and endless fun.
For those of us from a farming community in central California, celebrations in the summer were an obstacle to getting the work done. My holiday consisted of going to my grandparents farm at the end of the day for home made fireworks – which fascinated us enough and home made ice cream and then home to bed to be able to have an early start the next day.
Once we had our own family, we tried to carve out our own tradition but nothing ever stuck. We would go to my husband’s hometown and try to embrace his excitement but you can never go back to those carefree days-friends and family grow old and disperse.
One year, a couple of my kids marched in the Washington DC parade. All I can remember is how hot it was for all of us. I did appreciate the misery of our forefathers though on those miserable hot July days trying to make such cataclysmic decisions.
I can’t help but think about the first Independence Day. It wasn’t so neat and clean as it appears in the famous painting by John Trumbull with all our founders calmly standing around, signing this perilous defining document that set the wheels in motion for the existence of our country.
It wasn’t a neat, clean, fun day. It was hot, sticky and muggy. The signing of the document put people’s lives and livelihoods in danger. Families and friends would be divided. And the bloodshed and work only just began…The revolution could have been a disaster as so many have been afterwards and our founders all knew it.
The blessings we have today are beyond what any generation could even imagine. So if you are sad because you can’t go back or don’t have any grand plans try to enjoy what you have at hand, even if it is just a place to sit, look up, remember and thank our God for the blessings of freedom, even if its not perfect.
Around the Table 