We celebrated Independence Day every year when I was growing up in Northern Minnesota. I always used to say we were celebrating the birth of our country by blowing a piece of it up. At least we didn\u2019t have to worry about setting it on fire. When it snows nine months out of the year, and rains in six or so, forest fires don\u2019t seem like a real danger. I can\u2019t tell you how many times I set off fireworks from snow banks in fact. Though to be fair, I did often set them off a little early. What can I say? I like fireworks. And I loved growing up in America. I honestly did not know how lucky I was back then. Now I do, and I thank God on a daily basis for that blessing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We celebrated Independence Day every year when I was growing up in Northern Minnesota. I always used to say we were celebrating the birth of our country by blowing a piece of it up. At least we didn\u2019t have to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-jack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10435,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10434\/revisions\/10435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackofharts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}