love was a country you just couldn't defend

I love the fourth of July. It's not something I've always acknowledged. Nationalism can be destructive in today's highly charged political climate, and all the best fireworks are mostly illegal in Virginia. All the same, I remember the first time I felt excited about it. I was waitressing back home on a college break; a job I hated almost as much as my tables must have hated me. (I was no talent whatsoever at it.)

That night, I'd been cut early, and I had thirty bucks in my white apron pocket: the meager spoils of a slow night. I had my hair in pigtail braids with red, white, and blue ribbons ties. That cheap trick hadn't worked. The boys asked me to sit at the bar and take shots with them, but I lied and said I had somewhere to be. I drove home the long way through the hot, leftover light that lasts in summer, even after evening has come on.

There's no way you would call NoVa pretty these days, but I am old enough to remember when it used to be, and it was still somehow that night, the way every now and then you can see a flash of beauty in a woman whose features have aged away. It can get this look to it where everything is soft and pliant. The dark Virginia cedars and the ragged fields have a cast of rose or dust. The flashes of colorful light and rolls of spicy smoke off the various firework displays made it feel like traveling across some battlefield.

I like the fourth because of all the rich color. I like it because it's a celebration during my favorite time of year, when everything is blooming and awake and fucking and going. I like the fourth because, as much as I love the giving and preparing and tradition and hard work of the more formal holidays, the fourth you just get a day off to spend with people you like doing what you want. There are no expectations. Even the steady rain I woke up to today doesn't do anything but add to it.


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New moon in Cancer today. Deep and tender times.

So what if I'm the kind of girl who gets excited about good coupons at the kroger this month? I just have this one little life. All my flowers are coming in and I can make some good bouquets, take them to people I love. Trade them for bread from my baker friend. My breasts look great in the top I'm wearing right now. My house is clean enough. These little tender joys. There's a lot of reason to be optimistic.

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My friend has this print hanging above his toilet. It's an old school lady astronaut with the text "I'm going to space, you son of a bitch!" He told me the backstory of it: it was something the artist had overheard his unhappy mother retort to his father. I like that. I'm going to space, you son of a bitch.