We will be hot today. It will reach 82°. Partly cloudy is also predicted, but right now it is totally cloudy. Earlier, the sun was here for a bit, and I figure it will be back. A breeze is blowing from the south. I can feel it all the way down the hall from the back door. I hope it stays around.

When I was a kid, my father was a mighty hunter. Armed with only a magazine, he hunted and attacked mosquitos. I remember him standing on my bed trying to kill the mosquitos on the ceiling. The mattress was rocked as he move up and down the bed. That I was trying to sleep was no nevermind. His prey directed his movements. The ceiling in my room gave evidence of his successes. Blotches of his victims dotted the ceiling, even spots of blood, evidence of mosquitos having found their targets and of my father having found them.

My mother kept a fly swatter around. It was one of those with a thin metal handle and a square of flexible plastic at the end of it. Flies were tricky. Because they sensed that swatter and flew off, technique was important. You had to slowly lift the swatter and flick the end at the fly, sort of as if you had a whip. We preferred to stun the flies, not out of any sense of guilt at their demise by our hands but because we had a turtle, a Woolworth’s turtle which lived for years in a plastic home with a palm tree on our kitchen counter. It loved the stunned flies which sort of hopped across the water in his bowl. We’d watch the turtle chase, catch the fly and dine.

Behind and below the houses on my street was a field. In the summer it had tall brown grass. We used to take a jar, bang air holes in the cover and run across the field catching grasshoppers in the air as they jumped in front of us. We’d try to catch as many as we could in the jar. They were brown grasshoppers. We never kept them. We let them go after the hunt.

Spiders have never scared me. I don’t get why some people, seemingly mostly women, are afraid of them. Maybe Little Miss Muffet is the cause. Only two, the black widow and the brown recluse, out of 614 species in the United States, are harmful to humans (I had to look that up). The rest eat insects which would otherwise consume our crops. In August my house is an incubator of sorts. Baby spiders emerge and weave the tiniest webs usually on window panes. They remind me of Wilbur saved by Charlotte and of the generations of Charlotte’s offspring who kept him company over the years.

Happy July 4th!!

I do have an annual musing for today, but I thought I’d just give you my usual update first. It is raining. It is 74˚ and thundershowers are predicted for later. I’m hoping the weather changes in time for our uke concert tonight on the Hyannis Green. We’re playing from the Across America book then we’ll end with a few patriotic tunes in honor of the day. I’m going to wear my shirt with blue and red stars and one of my fascinators.

I just love birthdays and today is the grandest of them all. 

On July 3rd 1776, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife Abigail. In it, he predicted the celebrations for American Independence Day, including the parties:

“It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other.”

John Adams expected July 2nd to be Independence Day as that was the day the Second Continental Congress voted for independence, but the signing ceremony for the Declaration of Independence didn’t happen until two days later so because July 4th appears on the Declaration, it became the date we celebrate Independence.

I know some people complain that the meaning of the day is lost in the barbecues and the fireworks, but they have forgotten John Adams’ hope. We are honoring the day exactly as he wished. Flags are waving everywhere. Families get together to celebrate and to break bread, albeit hot dog rolls. Fireworks illuminate the sky. Baseball is played on small town fields and in huge stadiums. Drums beat the cadence in parades. We sing rousing songs celebrating America and our freedom. We also sing heartfelt songs about what America means to us. We are many sorts of people, we Americans. We don’t all look the same, practice the same religion, eat the same foods or dress in the same way, but we all celebrate today.

“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4th, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.” Happy Birthday, America, from all of us Americans.