~:: Back to the 4th ::~

I’m going to be moving backward in time here. Unevenly, too. Again, this blog is – at its heart – the journal I’m keeping of our lives. So I don’t want to miss things. I just wish I weren’t compelled to post every flipping image I take. Which I don’t. But maybe forty out of two hundred fifty.

I love little paths

So here were are on the 3rd of July. Our little cities freak out for Independence day – fairs and parades and historical villages. We missed the colonial village to the north last year, so I was glad when Chaz wanted to go up there this year.

A wood carver at work.  I bought the most cunning crochet hook from him.  And Chaz bought a spoon for her kitchen. There were also spinners and weavers and  bakers of hardtack—iron mongers (I bought a little leaf-hook to hang on the wall, so I could hang my hand-made broom), potters and a magnificent broom maker/cooper, all working out in the open for the edification of all.

Chaz was intending to offer her services to the village, so she dressed the part.

This is not Chaz. This is her re-enactment buddy who sewed every one of these absolutely historically correct uniforms himself.

Not the part of ABIGAIL Adams, though; you couldn’t pay her to wear stays and corsets and layers of thick fabric skirts.

Chaz, posing with another buddy, a woman far more cooperative than Chaz is herself.

But she’ll wear breaches and a frock coat and march with the guys.

This is her soul’s story: she marches defiantly off, covertly following her beloved, dressed in boys’ clothes and carrying her father’s ancient blunderbuss (which her brother taught her to shoot, just for the joy of watching it knock her over every time).

In her disguise, she smugly exchanges aphorisms with interesting characters, like Rowdy old Ben Franklin.

And keeps an eye on the troups.

In the battle, it’s her shot that saves her loves’s life, and she stands over him, swinging the empty gun until the battle is over and she can catch a horse to take him safely home.

And here’s the deal: she marries him, but only under the condition that she can wear trousers and hunt woodcocks and climb trees with her sons and daughters no matter what anybody else thinks. Someday, she’d sneak in to vote, too, and they’d end up writing kids’ books about her two hundred years later. Yep. She’d like that.

And that is what happened after the balloons and before the actual 4th.