Hello!

Welcome to The Epic! I am launching this blog as a manifesto for and a guide to living well. The title and motto of the blog are taken from the Epicureans, at least some of whom believed in the notion that not one minute of the future was guaranteed to them and that as a result they had the duty to live life to its fullest every moment.

I believe in discovering fun and pleasurable things wherever I find myself each day and I am told I have a knack for unearthing them. My hope is that by sharing in my pleasures and some of my ways of finding them you will begin to collect all the riches that lie in the moments of your life. They are there. Take them! All our lives should be.....Epic.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Independence Day

Random memories from many Northern Wisconsin 300 person home town Fourth of July holidays...

1. Kids decorating our bikes for the parade.
2. Old fellows wearing hats from the American Legion.
3. Pumpkin ball games [where the men would play baseball with a ball the size of a pumpkin].
4. Watermelon [available only one day a year].
5. Contests to see who could spit the watermelon seeds the farthest.
6. My Swedish grandma having my grandpa nail spinning fireworks to the pole that held up the laundry drying line in our back yard.
7. Waiting breathless for my Dad to come back into town from working far away, his auto trunk loaded with fresh yellow corn that we shucked and boiled in a big pot.
8. The sun setting long into the northern evening as bratwurst sausages cooked on a charcoal grill.
9. Fireflies dancing in the fading light, the only fireworks our town could afford.
10. Hearing a phonograph record in our small living room playing "Hooray For The Red White and Blue".
11. The odd feeling, even then, that those sort of days were rapidly dwindling in number.
12. Freedom, glorious freedom.

Happy Fourth of July to all freedom seekers everywhere.
ML

Photo Credit: Marthastewart.com

4 comments:

Stu said...

Looks like you had a great day! Enjoy the fireworks :)

Silk Regimental said...

I could feel every bit of this post... the hot corn, the fireflies, the seed spitting (I won), snitchin a swig of beer from my Dad's beer.

Freedom!

Sandra said...

Beautiful Post. Small-town America - nothing like it . . . xoxo

ADG said...

Great memories indeed.