Despite the rain, the parade went on as expected. For a tiny town in the heart of Illinois farming country, they put on a fairly large parade. It lasted about 45 minutes this year. The citizens of the town must save up all year long to provide candy, gobs of candy, for the parade-goers. String Bean stood in the rain, under an umbrella dutifully waving at every float and picking up the handfuls of candy tossed her way. One float full of junior high baseball players chucked candy at us as if were baseballs. Another float had good ole Abe and his wife (in honor of this being his 200th birthday) threw pennies which increased String Bean's life savings from 5 cents to 8 cents!
We were really looking forward to the fireworks display, as we do every year, since the town's display, lasting over an hour, rivals if not beats anything in our hometown. This was going to be String Bean's first fireworks show.
Due to the heavy rain we'd had all day, the fireworks were called off. Apparently the firemen did not feel the could safely get away if something went awry with the fireworks due to the soggy and slick ground where the fireworks are let off. As a sign in one town said, "July 4th has been rescheduled to July 5th." Unfortunately, due to that pesky thing we call employment, we had to leave this afternoon instead of sticking around for the rescheduled July 4th.
I'm hoping someone shoots off (illegal) fireworks tonight so I can feel like our nation's birthday was truly celebrated this year!
