Looking Up

 

7/4/22 Green Lake neighborhood

Call me a curmudgeon, but the older I get, the more the Fourth of July feels like a day of noisy, dangerous firecrackers and less like a celebration of our country’s independence. On top of that, I’ve also had difficulty feeling like a proud American in recent years.

With ambivalence about the holiday, I went out looking for some patriotic color on Monday. Numerous flags were flying from balconies at a Green Lake retirement community. As I stood on the sidewalk sketching, several residents passed by coming out of or going into their building. Stopping to chat with me and to see what I was doing, they all noticed the flags only because I was sketching them. Sometimes it’s important to look up instead of straight ahead.