Telluride on the Fourth: In hindsight in pics and words!

06 Jul Telluride on the Fourth: In hindsight in pics and words!

On the Fourth of July, people tend to put red state/blue state issues aside and, per F. Scott Fitzgerald, “stand at moral attention,” saluting the Stars and Stripes as one nation. On that day, we are meant to honor the young men and women who put on uniforms, boarded trains and planes and promised their families they would return, knowing full well they might not be back at all.

Telluride’s spin on the Fourth includes a parade straight out of Norman Rockwell, a flyover, kids, dogs, horses, floats, wagons, bikes, bbqs, men and women in uniform and a crowd of cheerleaders. Those festivities, likely among the most fun and most imaginative in the nation (for a small town celebration), deserve to be documented with fabulous photographs.

Enter photojournalist and Telluride local Lisa Barlow: “Independence Day in Telluride, always a joyful celebration of what makes each of us unique and the bonds and beliefs that hold us together.”

The coda on this story is thanks to Word Woman Rosemerry Trommer (scroll down).

And now the trope in action, the one about a picture being worth a thousand words:

Rosemerry now gets the last word:

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, credit; Joanie Schwarz.

I Loved Those Years When

We sat in the grass
on my grandparents’ lawn
and watched fireworks
above the lagoon,
and as the sky glittered
gold and red and silver
and the humid air boomed
with the rapture of celebration,
my family a chorus of awe.
And the fireflies put on a show
of their own, and no one I loved
had died. How magic it all was.
Oh, how we ooohed, we ahhhed.