The Effect of Rain on July Fourth

I’m scrolling through Facebook today where many are posting holiday greetings with bright red, white and blue graphics. Here in New England, it’s been an overcast and rainy week, continuing into the second day of the long holiday weekend.

My perennials and young vegetables were on life support during the June drought. Evening watering didn’t help much during the heat wave, but the deep soaking these past few days has outrageously greened up everything, even the weeds after I’d spent weeks laboriously pulling out their predecessors.

crabgrass . . .
constellations
of landlocked sea stars

Not quite halfway through the holiday weekend, I take the opportunity to muse about life during the summer of 2021. Fireworks not scheduled anywhere I know, but even if they were, they are rained out. No parades scheduled either, for social distancing reasons. Area beaches unwelcoming with wet sand and no sun.

I was invited to a large holiday celebration at someone’s beautiful beachfront home but respectfully declined. My reluctance has to do with the inevitable intense sociability which is after all the purpose of the gathering, and the close personal proximity that surely occurs. I didn’t mean to bring up pandemic stuff, but I just did . . . my apologies. So I will rein myself back in to the quiet day at home where nothing happens.

There is a college campus down the road where David and I will walk the cross-country trails around the lake this afternoon. No fanfare or fireworks, just our own quiet adventure, ending with conversation on a stone bench overlooking the lake in the photo above. We’ve discovered many beautiful natural venues in the region—historic farms with ancient stone boundary walls, wildlife sanctuaries, forest and dune trails, even a Japanese estate garden—while everything else has been closed or at least limited.

But not attending holiday events doesn’t mean I can’t use them for subject matter in my writing. Here is a poem I composed for the children’s haiku book I will dedicate to my grandchildren. I’m working with an illustrator to include colorable drawings:

fireworks
climb high
into the sky

they sizzle
and fizzle

crackle
and zoom

before they go
BOOM!

Remembering trips to the Jersey Shore or Miami Beach, I recall a sight that I’m not sure still happens:

beach afternoon
the skywriter’s message
drifts into the blue

And in closing, I wrote a haiku in honor of Election Day 2020 which I re-dedicate to Independence Day 2021:

(all poems copyrighted by author Barrie Levine 2020/2021; beach afternoon placed first in St. John’s Cultural Council Haiku Contest, St. Augustine 2021)