The Flags

 

Here we have the front of our house on a Fourth of July several years ago. It wasn't from the first Fourth of July that Miles got hurt and had to go to the ER and it wasn't from the second Fourth of July that Miles visited the ER, though it could have been. Andrew and Joe are adjusting the flag that flies out front almost all the time.

Sometime during the pandemic, Joe built a kind of a yardarm for the back yard. He'd acquired a hot tub that was installed under the deck and, of course, he didn't want the birdhouses to be directly above the hot tub, so the yardarm was where the birdhouses were installed and a second flag was flying at the top. It looked like this, before the flag was raised:

The November, 2024 election results hit us hard. We felt like we couldn't fly our flags, at least temporarily. So we took them down and put them away. But the flag holders (there must be a special, specific word for these, a word that I don't know yet) were empty and we felt as though something was missing.

Not any more!