The Fourth of July, Blanding style

I first met Blanding on the Fourth of July many years ago when my family and I visited my brother Tom.
After some rough experiences including war, Tom, a police officer, decided he wanted to raise his young family in a small religious town so he looked on a Utah map, prayed, and chose two possibilities, St. George and Blanding.
He and his wife planned to accept whichever town offered him a job first, but one of his high school buddies had already moved to St. George, making that community more attractive.
Blanding beat out St. George, and that offer changed the trajectory of our lives. Bevan Wright still laughs about Tom’s police debut as a bearded, husky ex-marine wearing overalls and toting a gun.
I also wore overalls, but they were purple, stylish, and of course, minus the gun. If Blanding didn’t know what to make of the strange Midwesterners that long-ago Fourth of July, I felt equally bemused.
I’d been raised in Kansas, mostly in small towns and on a farm and had seen my share of patriotic parades, but nothing prepared me for Blanding’s festivities. Navajo men and women sat on benches dressed in beautiful traditional clothing: Velveteen blouses and long skirts for the women, ribbon shirts and jeans for the men, all adorned in elegant turquoise jewelry.
The parade itself proved to be a trip back in time with floats celebrating the area’s pioneer heritage and Walter C. Lyman’s prophesy that Blanding would one day become an important educational center, especially for the native peoples.
After the parade, we toured the booths set up on the School District’s lawn, and I ate my first Navajo taco. My son was not quite a year old, so I carried him most of the time.
I still remember the ache in my arms from his weight, but it was a good ache because he’d been born two months prematurely, and we’d almost lost him at birth.
That night we watched fireworks at the football field and afterwards let the kids wave sparklers to their hearts’ content.
The next week, our entire family camped in Babylon Pastures for two days. The meadow filled with lush grasses and wildflowers and surrounded by pines and aspens seemed like one of the most beautiful places in the world.
I didn’t want to leave, but after we broke camp, we drove to Monument Valley where we saw two double rainbows arching over the monuments. I thought the rainbows might be a good omen, but they turned out to be a mixed blessing.
After we returned to Kansas, my first husband and I hit turbulent waters, separated, and then divorced. A year later I moved to Blanding with my mother, son, and younger brother to be near Tom and to become part of that infant educational center.
Fast forward many years, and I still love Blanding’s Fourth of July celebration and deeply appreciated this year’s theme, “United We Stand.”
Although I grew up in a radical, conflicted generation, the world now seems even more complicated, divided, and beleaguered with floods, droughts, diseases, and conflicts ranging all the way from wars between nations to mini-wars within our own hearts.
However, in one of those miraculous acts of love and peace, on July first a Ukrainian family flew into Salt Lake City and then traveled to Blanding.
Sponsored by a former LDS missionary, they were war refugees who had spent time in Poland, Germany, France, and Canada on their way to freedom.
Many community members donated money, housing, furnishings, and transportation to help them establish a home here, and since the wife’s birthday is on July 4, this year’s celebration seemed particularly potent.
We celebrated with our daughter and her husband from St. George. We watched the melodrama on Saturday, booing the villain and cheering the handsome hero. After the parade on the fourth, we toured the booths in Centennial Park.
Children raced around, playing on the equipment or with each other. Teenagers sauntered the park, trying to attract yet seem uninterested in the opposite sex.
Young adults pushed strollers with babies and carried toddlers on their shoulders, and senior citizens, wearing broad-brimmed hats, thronged the park, all buying food and craft items.
The lines for lunch were long, but Ted managed to get a Navajo Taco. I ate delectable frybread and our guests chowed down on Island food.
Even though the fireworks had to be postponed for a week, there were many activities to choose from. We even drove out to Babylon Pastures to spend time with friends and yes, it’s still one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Yet my heart aches for those children starving in Somalia, those dying in the Russian-Ukrainian war, and those killed in the unprecedented number of mass shootings in our own country.
What can one person do? We start with ourselves. Li Jun Feng, a qigong master, says, “Use love to dissolve the hatred. Love one another, even your enemies.
When you love your enemy, soon you will become friends. If we are full of love, the place becomes holy. Love purifies the area, purifies the environment, purifies the society.”
If love really has that kind of power – and I believe it does – it paves the way to a new world. It starts with one person, one family, and one town at a time.