Next weekend is the Fourth of July. It is sunny and glorious, the weather report predicts a sunny weekend. Yay! I have my “To Do” list: Pull out the decorations, the buntings, the flag, the red-white- and blue. Bake an “Apple of Her Eye” pie for the St. John’s pie sale. Make my mom’s famous potato salad for a picnic. Buy lemons for lemonade, fresh squeezed, mixed with sparkling water. SO refreshing on these hot days!

I love the Fourth of July holiday. The Fourth, for me, meant trips to the family cabin, a train ride into the mountains with kids and dogs, friends and family. It meant fireworks off the docks, girls piled in the car, folks tailgating, music, boats dotting the dark water, bright little lights circling the barge, the collective “Ohhhs” and “Ahhhhs” of the crowd. It also meant Fireworks in the backyard, kids with sparklers, afternoon BBQs. It means cheesy small town parades with every baseball team and local candidate. Class floats and emergency vehicles whooping their alarms. The Fourth of July was….

Red.

White.

And Blue.

As I pull out the seasonal decorations, ready to hang my red-white-and-blue bunting on my mailbox, I hesitate. For the first time I wonder, what will this bunting say about us? I get a little rush of anger, because the truth is, it could say a lot about us. And the truth is….”They” have hijacked the American Flag. They hijacked it with every jacked up truck that has a tattered flag, along with a “Don’t Tread On Me” sticker in the window and “Let’s Go Brandon” plastered to the bumper. They hijacked red-white-and-blue.

It has been a strange year. It is hard to feel patriotic (and yes, I feel like that word has been hijacked as well) as I follow the Jan. 6 hearings, as I follow the recent Supreme Court rulings, gun control issues. I even think of Fredrick Douglass and how the Fourth of July, so many many years after his famous speech still means something different for Black Lives. I go back and forth. Back and forth. I love history enough to know what it means, what the flag stands for. But this year I decide to give it a break. I am feeling just a little sad. As a friend said, maybe this Fourth will be “just like any other day.”