and the home of the brave

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

I absolutely love the Ray Charles version of "America the Beautiful." It makes me feel patriotic and summertimey. It makes me want to roll up my jeans and dip my toes in the pool and slurp a melting popsicle and wave a sparkler and a small American flag and if I had more hands I'd be holding a hot dog AND a hamburger (because who can ever really choose) and a box of cracker jacks and a piece of apple pie and one of those giant foam fingers people wear at sporting events and one of my hands would be over my heart. Heart is where the home is, and home is America the Beautiful, God shed his grace on thee.

I had a lovely lovely fourth of July (fourth of July is the antithesis of New Year's Eve--it always exceeds my expectations and thus continues to move up on my favorite holiday list) and I watched fireworks from a distance while a small radio played old jazzy songs. I also got to wait through dusk on a picnic blanket on grass (that sentence is awkwardly prepositional cause I tried to avoid using the word lie or lay or laid since I never quite got that lesson in school), and nothing says fourth of july like a picnic blanket on grass.