happy 4th

Sparklers on the dock, originally uploaded by Emily ♥ Follow The White Rabbit.

for those of you celebrating the 4th of july in the united states, i hope you are having a wonderful holiday weekend and some tasty potato salad.

for me, the 4th has always been a pretty mellow holiday, and being in japan i don't miss it so much. in grad school, when i was part of a international summer studio posse, it seemed like we would always wind up in asia for the 4th, taipei or china, and go to pizza hut to 'celebrate.' (sorry, i know pizza hut is gross and corporate, but until you've been a cheese-lover in asia, don't knock it!)

when i lived in seattle, we could see the fireworks from our front yard, which made for a nice yearly bbq party (ohh, i do miss bbq, or 'grilling out' as we say where i'm from).

in college in portland, mostly i think we watched fireworks from roofs of warehouses, or later the roofs of people's apartment buildings.

when i was a kid, we usually stayed home for the 4th, with some small fireworks in the backyard. i always was fascinated by the smoke snakes (cobras? is that what they were called?). and of course we had sparklers, and tried to write our names with the light before they burned out.

i love this photo from emily follow the white rabbit on flickr. when i was a kid, we didn't have time lapse photography, and the image only lasted as a memory of your eye.

but the key is, when someone hands you a sparkler, you have to move! wave it around, make circles, run around barefoot in the grass with the fireflies and crickets in the backround.