Summer’s just begun, but it seems it’s half over already and it is hard to believe the Fourth of July holiday is already here. School will be starting back before you know it, and Christmas is less than six full months away.
The Independence Day holiday has always been one we enjoy celebrating. I remember way back to 1976 and America’s Bicentennial. All kinds of great celebrations were going on from small towns to the big cities.
Over in Newton, where I grew up, everybody painted up the fire hydrants in their front yards to look like all kinds of patriotic things. Yes, patriotism was alive and well in my hometown.
That year on the Fourth of July, which just happened to fall on a Sunday — my late mother always said God set it up that way — everybody and their brother, it seemed, swarmed the hillside at the First Baptist Church for a giant community picnic. It was a blast and I expect God set that part up too.
Now, as we enter our nation’s 250th year, I wonder if we are all still waving the red, white and blue as we should be. I think we need to dig down deep and see if we can’t get a little bit of that Bicentennial spirit back in 2025.
The extreme heat of the last couple of weeks reminds me of one of my most memorable Fourth of July holidays.
Me and a group of friends packed a car, a van and a little old trailer and headed to Colorado for a couple of weeks of camping in the mountains. When we left Mississippi the temperature was hovering around 100 degrees and by the time we got to Dallas it had inched on up to about 104 if my memory serves me correctly. The year was 1980. If you remember that summer, you remember it was hot. Bad hot!
Anyway, by the time we got just past Dallas we decided to make our stop for the night at a place called Possum Kingdom State Park. No kidding. Matter of fact the name of the place was the reason we planned to stay there.
It was the Fourth of July and the joint was slam, jam packed with folks celebrating the holiday. There was absolutely no room in the inn that night so we pulled off on a little side road in the park and made our own campground out on a hillside in the dark.
Not long after we got camp set up, we could hear the fireworks show begin and made our way out through this little field for a better view. By that time the blistering daylight had given way to a much more bearable evening and our private viewing area made for a perfect holiday spectacular. Even with a rattlesnake rattling somewhere “too” close by.
Lots of Independence Days have come and gone since then, some of them we’ve celebrated more robustly than others. For certain, though, all of them we have indeed celebrated, whether it be dueling fireworks with neighbors on the beach or dueling Budweisers with friends by the pool.
This year we will be watching fireworks in Fairhope, Alabama as they explode over Mobile Bay. We’ve been doing that for three or four years now and it has really kind of become a family tradition. I suppose you could say we are now Fourth of July transplants in Fairhope.
An Airbnb helps with that. We have a nice room in a house just steps from the bay, with French doors opening out onto a big front porch. Wife Danny and I move in for a few days and pretend like it is our own home. And it is, for those few days at least.
Last year we took a picnic and spread it on the ground in the park and sat back, listening to the symphony on the bluff, and watching the sailboats float peacefully by. It will be something similar to that this year too, I feel certain.
One thing for sure, the flag will be flying high at the top of her pole, all that old red, white and blue will be waving proudly whereever we find ourselves, and we will be celebrating freedom just like we’ve done every year before.
Ya’ll get out there and celebrate you some good ole American freedom too. It’s kind of fun!
Here’s hoping you have a safe and happy holiday.
