Baby, You're A Firework

Happy Fourth of July to all zero of my American readers. 235 years is the blink of an eye compared to the long history of the nations that birthed and midwifed us. 235 years has changed us deeply but has made little impact on the central things we hold dear.

235 years ago:

My ancestors still lived in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Roman Catholics in a predominantly Protestant nation. Their region and their province were descending into an economic depression in the most ruthlessly capitalist society of their day.

My husband's ancestors probably already lived in Santa Fe, (eventually to become New) Mexico. It wouldn't be until his father's generation that members of his family stopped primarily speaking Spanish.

The women who unknowingly would lead to me and my husband were spinning, knitting, weaving, and creating. They provided clothing for their families as part of their work, and they were proud to do it. Skills I know and want to learn today as a passionate hobby, for fun, they were doing on a daily basis because otherwise those in their care just plain wouldn't be clothed.

The Wolf River I floated down today in an inner tube was being visited by deer, badgers, birds, dragonflies...and Native Americans. It was surrounded by forest, where farmland and small rural towns stand today. Where my house now stands, Native Americans of a related tribe, if not the same one, were hunting, beginning to trade with the European trappers who stumbled into the area and were making themselves at home. They built a community in a place they called The Good Land next to a really big lake that, for all they knew, may as well have been the ocean.

None of the peoples mentioned above probably had much of an idea 235 years ago today about the events that were taking place in Philadelphia. If they had heard of the English king and his colonies, it was as a side note to their everyday lives. As a result of the ensuing 235 years, the nation I'm proud to call my home has been molded into what she is today. Those condescended-to Dutch Catholics who had lost everything, those proud descendents of Spanish military men who built a thriving town in the mountain desert of northern Mexico, the different kinds of people who turned this nice place for a harbor into a port town, all found a place in this nation. Happy 235th, USA. Compared to the nations whose tired, poor, and disheartened you welcomed, you're a firework. Brilliant, explosive with progress, and impossible to hold down without getting burned.