Grace And Glory

Some may remember this as the summer that never showed up. Some may remember it as the summer that would never leave. Either way, it is memorable for the discomforts it has sown in this, the most laid-back time of year. Someone left the cold taps running for all of June and July. Way too much water chiseled a channel of resignation to “Yankee weather” down the middle of our inconvenienced lives, and the only thing dry was the humor we used to cope with it.

Now, in early August, as the rain seems to have finally exhausted its initial exuberance and is limiting itself to occasional thundering tantrums in the late afternoons, the sun holds sway at last, and we may now venture out into the wreckage of our gardens. While we had hoped to redeem the season with tomatoes, we now find they are succumbing to the overlapping ravages of early and late blight — a legacy of summer’s soggy start. Entomologists tell us our favorite garden pollinators, the butterflies, are another casualty of the early and persistent rain. And wouldn’t you know it? This is a perfect summer for mosquitoes.

So now, as summer wears on… and on, we have been on the lookout for something to lift our flagging spirits, and fittingly we found it in flags — lots of them. They stretch from Currituck to Glover like a procession of acolytes to Newtown’s signature flag in the middle of Main Street. The flags appeared last Sunday on utility poles along that route courtesy of the Newtown Lions Club, which took inspiration from a similar display in Brookfield. The flags will fly until early October and will reappear in May next year, starting a new summer tradition for Newtown.

This latest addition to Newtown’s already-impressive Main Street has won universal approval, judging from the initial comments that piled up on The Bee’s Facebook page after a photo of the flags appeared there on Monday — no small accomplishment in a town that is notoriously reluctant to countenance any change in the look of its most famous street.

We Americans never seem to tire of contention in our politics, culture, and personal lives, but the American flag covers us all, even in turbulent times. Think of Neil Armstrong saluting the flag on the moon, and then think of Peter Fonda and his star-spangled motorcycle in Easy Rider, both icons of another memorable summer 40 years ago — the summer of 1969. Both men, literally worlds apart in their expression of the American experience, were stitched together by a durable and adaptable flag in a summer when our culture was straining at the seams.

So when even the most unpleasant summer leaves us feeling a little untethered and dislocated, it is reassuring to come around the bend at Currituck and be reminded that we are all in this together, like individual stars and stripes, moving together with grace and glory through whatever the seasons throw at us. We thank the Lions Club for this timely reassurance.