I Think it was the Fourth of July

The Fourth of July is a holiday in which we celebrate some guys signing a piece of paper to get exempted from their taxes and we celebrate it by getting liquored up and setting off explosives in the sky. I kid, but only because I had a really fun time.

This year, we were invited to a family friend’s lake house about four miles from Florida to watch some fireworks and grill out. That’s nice considering that my family never has big plans for the fourth. The holiday always comes and we just group up with someone else who is throwing a party. As long as we’re looking up at the sky as fireworks go off, we consider it a success.

It was a BYOB Fourth of July celebration, in which we brought an entire pitcher of white sangria, and since I also got tapped to bring a dessert, I spent the morning making a strawberry shortcake trifle with my mother. There’s something about making a strawberry shortcake trifle for a Fourth of July party, while sixties music played in the background, that made me feel like a sixties housewife. In the weird hypothetical I made up in my head, I was making the strawberry shortcake trifle using a recipe that I found in a lady’s home journal with a frilly apron over my Leave it to Beaver dress.

At the lake there was day-drinking, grilling, music, boating, fireworks and old friends who we hadn’t seen since the start of the pandemic. At first we were playing some AC/DC, because nothing says celebrating America quite like listening to a band from Australia. Then, we got on a boat and drove through the lakes while fireworks went off, directly over our heads. We enjoyed other people’s fireworks, while navigating the dark water that was packed with other boats.

I took a million blurry pictures of my mother and her friends while trying to get the fireworks in the background. Then, we drove back to finally watch our own fireworks. Everybody valued their fingers and launched them off the docks at a safe distance, while we watched.

It was a perfect and fun way to celebrate our country’s independence. There’s no better way to enjoy our country than to light off fireworks that, like most goods in America, originated in China.