The July 4th Parade

I've been attending the July 4th parade in our home town for years. As a child, I participated in the parade on various floats, I twirled a baton in the parade, dressed as characters and on and on.  As an adult, I've handed out fliers on the parade route and probably participated in a float or two.

But I have to say, it was with a tear in my eye that we watch this year's parade. It was another piece of the high school era that started with Maddie! She's in color guard and they marched!

Here we are set up to watch the parade.

You have to set up early for small town parades like ours. Otherwise, you might not get a seat! It was packed all along the parade route.

One of the coolest things about living in the 'ville is that adults with special needs are part of our daily life. In fact, they have their own boy scout troop and they lead the parade with one of the younger troops.

Also in the 'ville we do the typical floats of beauty queens and cheerleaders... but how bout the high school Football Team!! Go Jackets!

And after a dozen police cars and every fire truck in the tri county area, we get to our Yellow Jacket Band! Thankfully marching ahead of the horses! 

Maddie is one of the guard members! She is in the middle row, furthest from my camera. ugh. I didn't think to ask her which side of the street I needed to be on!

But another one of the great things about our town... we all parent each other kids... and we take pictures of them! Debbie took this picture of Maddie and I love it!!  So thankful for our village!

So if you have never been to a small town Texas parade, I invite you to ours. We have the July 4th parade, but we also do Rodeo parades, a homecoming parade for the local university and some years, when we win the state football championship, we have a parade for that too! 

Sometimes doing your civic duty means being in a parade!

Small Town USA, yep, that's where we live.  Actually, it's Stephenville, Texas.

In our little corner of the world, we have a parade on July 4th!  Given the size of the community, about 15 thousand people, we have a huge parade!  There have to be a few hundred floats (that includes trucks, cars and horses) plus we have thousands of people sit along the main street and watch.

It is a lot of fun.  I have wonderful memories of the parade growing up. I was in it as the Statue of Liberty on year, I twirled batons for a few years and rode for various clubs and organizations. Now we are passing these moments and memories on to our kids.

This year, we were supposed to be at the lake house with my family for the 4th, but given that I serve on the public library advisory board and we were in the parade, we came home early.

We used Doug's big red truck and one of the ladies on the Friend's board made signs.  I had bookmarks made and off we went!

The following pictures were taken by Bill.  A friend of ours who rode in the truck with Doug and Kylie while his wife walked and passed out bookmarks and his daughter waved to the crowd. Thanks Bill! 

 

Look at that tiny girl on that horse!

Kylie isn't too impressed with the parade!

 We ran out of bookmarks way too fast, but we had a great time.  It was fun to hear the crowds cheer for the public library!

We've decided next year, we will get tons more bookmarks made and recruit more walkers!

See, sometimes doing your civic duty can be fun!