It always takes me a few days after the Fourth of July weekend to rinse the last cooler and shake out the last sand-filled beach bag. I might throw the stinky salt-stained towels in the wash right away, but it'll be a while before they're all folded and ready to go. I chalk it up to sheer exhaustion, and maybe also to a secret wish to hold on a little longer to the fun.
But this year? I can predict the cooler, half-filled with melted ice and beach treasures, will sit on the porch even longer.
This Fourth of July was so intensely bittersweet. It's been a long year in this town. Last August, we were shook with shock and then rode a horrible current of relentless sadness: Allie Castner's death left no one untouched. Cries for justice, for explanations, for anything to make sense of it all, filled dinner parties and coffee shops and school playgrounds at pick-up. Names were mentioned, names were called and anger marched hand in hand with grief.
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Walk to School initiatives were launched and abandoned, studies were conducted and concluded and the best intentions of many seemed stained in a tragedy that felt too much to bear.
Come Winter, the sadness stayed, but as it always does, life and the business of it moved on. As budgets withered and the economy continued its sluggish progress, the list of overrides grew longer. The voices of both persuasion and dissent found their soap boxes in different measure until the rallying cries of pro and con clashed at Town Meeting in May.
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Onward toward the vote!
Crocuses come no matter the "mood," and they sprung up on lawns along with countless aluminum and cardboard signs of every kind: NO! YES! VOTE! Dinner parties and coffee shops and the playgrounds at pick up vibrated with the chatter of it all and also, with heavy doses of confusion – "are they taking that house by eminent domain?" and "what does that mean, reimbursement and when?" -- and, sometimes, vitriol.
When the last vote was counted, those who championed a "Not Now!" message celebrated as each and every override shriveled and died, celebrated as one family was left abandoned literally atop a toxic heap, and as parents, who were children themselves when suggested repairs might have been made, worried what school their own children would have.
In a town with sand on three sides, the line was drawn in concrete.No budging, no compromising, no nothing. Neighbor versus neighbor? Maybe.
On Sunday, we trekked to Brown's Island for our annual Fourth of July multi-family picnic. It was a beautiful day, if a little hot and even though the place seemed more like Lake Havasu than Marblehead, by 4:30, most of the party boats had moved on and the tide came in to turn the island back into one. I'm not sure when I saw it, but I did.
While the sky to the West put on an epic golden show, the sky to the East was pierced by a rainless rainbow. It wasn't arched, but more like an arrow shot down to us. I'm rarely metaphysical or even superstitious, but I wondered in those most gorgeous moments: Was this the sign we needed?
A wake-up call to the natural beauty around us, a beauty we have failed to emulate in our recent day-to-days? Or was this perhaps a tribute to a little girl lost? A reminder that no amount of money spent or saved could be greater or more important than she -- or this, our community of friends and neighbors?
Not long after, the harbor lit up and the first man-made booming booms rattled the horizon. The obligatory boat horns shouted their approval, as did we, each one of my posse, in unison. As we packed up in the dark, my daughter said, "Can we do this every year? Can this be our Fourth of July forever?"
Despite my utter exhaustion and the sand stuck to all my parts and my latent fear of stepping on something gross or sharp as we made our way, I said, yes, yes, yes. I don't think I have ever meant anything more.
This town is her home more than it will ever be mine. She lives in a place where grown-ups quarrel and shout and sometimes miss the good tree for the forest, and where bad things, incredibly awful things, happen.
But her home -- this place where you live -- as far as she knows. It's a place where rainbows come on the Fourth of July. We can do better. We have to.
