I meant to write a post for the holiday.
I was planning to tell you about the July 4th celebrations of my childhood, about how we rose early on those mornings to butcher a dozen or more chickens, strewing the ground between the house and barn with blood and matted white feathers.
I was going to write about how we finally put the last packages of meat into the freezer in the middle of the afternoon, and how afterwards we sat on aluminum folding chairs and ate fat wedges of watermelon, still smelling chicken flesh beneath our fingernails as sticky pink juice dripped from our wrists.
I wanted to tell you about our annual tradition, when twilight began to fall, of doing the Sparkler Dance, and how our father directed us to the front yard and pressed those thin powdery sticks into our hands and egged us on: put your whole self into it! Jen, let’s see a real smile! and watched as we carved shapes into the air, circles and squiggles and question marks, while the sharp, dry grass pricked the undersides of our bare feet.
About the way my adolescent self shrank during those moments, feeling like it was wrong to pretend that we knew how to dance when in fact we looked like the chickens, hours earlier, who ran helter skelter, this way and that, confused.
We traced fizzy blue lines in the night when what we really wanted was to be at the fairgrounds, stuffing our cheeks with greasy popcorn and cotton candy and watching the fireworks light up the sky. And we wished, as the distant popping sounds of the fireworks amplified our seclusion, that we were Normal.
{ that is what I intended to write about }
Then I decided to lock up my keyboard for the weekend and celebrate instead.
On the night of the 4th, as the night echoed with explosions and spark trails etched the sky, I marveled at the fact that here, in this moment so many years later, the Sparkler Dance and the chicken smell are tinged with nostalgia. And I laughed a little bit about the craziness of it all, about the way that sometimes happiness feels like a secret code, impossible to decipher, when it is here, always, mine for the taking.
I thought about how no one, anyone, is Normal.
And how I like it that way, and cherish the opportunity to swap un-Normal stories about muggy summers filled with adolescent angst + discovery + revelation.
Flashes of light and brilliant, blazing color: they're everywhere.
