tradition

tradition: a long-established custom that has been passed on.

Yes.

Perfect.

I love tradition.

I love events and details and activities that you do year after year, holiday after holiday, season after season.

And I love July Fourth.

Love it.

Love the mad rush that leads up to the day.

Love the kids helping decorate the porch so it looks all shades of blue, red and white festive.

Love the tattoos that every kid chooses to slap across their cheeks.

I think part of what I love is how you can try to make so many particulars the same –

the food, the location, the order of events (guns, tubing, excessive consumption of food, kickball, fireworks, sparklers) –

and yet,

year after year,

every element adds up to a completely unique experience.

And I love the tangled up beautiful way that it all comes together in the end.

Every time.

This year our family moved mountains – or just large Suburbans –

(and sacrificed a great deal of sleep)

so that every member of the Band of Keigley could celebrate together.

It was sort of insane.

(We ended up in the state of Virginia together for approximately twenty-four hours.  Which seems to be the theme of our summer.)

I thought it was worth it.

Although I was beginning to wonder at 3 a.m. on some one-laned back road on Turkeycock Mountain that old GPS decided was the fastest route from Point Home to Point Farm.

And we were already too far in to turn around and too sleepy to use our logical minds.

I figured it was worth it

when the annual kickball game took place and the kids were chasing the blue kickball all over the field,

barely acknowledging that the game had rules and the adults were all helping them run bases and laughing hysterically at their antics.

And I guessed it was worth it

when I was lazily drifting down the Pigg River for about the hundredth time of my life,

but only the second time of my life with my sweet-faced young ones all in tubes around me.

But I tell you this.

I knew it was worth it

when I rested on a blanket in the grass with my husband by my side and my barely-a-baby-any-longer Fox in my lap

and we all stared with kid-like wonder together at the sky to see the best fireworks a family shin dig has ever seen.

When Kevin asked Otto Fox if he liked the fireworks,

he shouted,

“MmmHmmm, Da-da!”