Flying

 

Remember that cute little house in Florida I used to talk about? The one we tried unsuccessfully to sell and is currently being inhabited by complete strangers while we dump cash into it from thousands of miles away? Well we always said it would have looked fantastic with old glory flying out front, standing sentry amongst those majestic oak trees. A little accent of Americana to highlight the adorable yard that took so much of our novice gardening skill, sweat and muscle to turn it into something befitting the neighborhood of lush, professionally groomed yards. We never did get around to buying that flag.

Now we've shoe-horned our life into a skinny, three-story middle unit of a Spanish-style triplex and there really isn't much we take personally about how it looks from the outside. Some nice men come with mowers and hedge trimmers each week and I think I sometimes hear sprinklers pop up with an early morning mist to quench that thin strip of green some might call a yard. We even accepted an award from the local garden club this past spring for third place in the "condos or apartments" division. We were proud of our giant hibiscus tree and the strange tropical flowers that seem to sprout in the flowerbeds from nowhere, until we saw a lot of properties sporting the same garden-club accolade during later strolls around the neighborhood.

Now it's summer and boy does our Southern California neighborhood sparkle. People are gathering here for Independence Day festivities from all areas of the city and our neighbors are really putting out the star-spangled welcome mat. We see banners and flags dancing happily on almost every house, amid beds of golden roses and indigo hydrangeas that burst with all the glory of the fireworks themselves. There's so much unity in this weekend's celebration, that I feel like I want our little piece of paradise to join the party.

So this morning I inspected the rusting flag mount outside the kids' balcony and decided I won't be letting another summer go without the star-spangled banner hanging out front.

The only remaining flag-flying supplies at the market today were the very picked-over dregs. I was stuck with a wooden pole that had a small crack in it and the 5-by-3-foot flag I was forced into may be a bit gawky for our slender condo, but I got her up with the help of a shoe-lace rigging system (please don't tell Uncle Sam) and she's now flapping happily high above the sidewalk.

Tomorrow our street will be crammed with parade-watchers, barbecue-grazers, lemonade-guzzlers, fireworks-admirers and beach-wanderers and this little condo on Ninth Street--our home on the west coast--will finally be dressed appropriately for the occasion.