Home Away from Home on the 4th
FXBG ADVANCE, Friday, July 3, 2026. The Afternoon Read.
By Claire Marshall Watkins
ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
‘Don’t Tell Me This Town Ain’t Got No Heart’
Every 4th of July, there’s a celebration downtown in Fredericksburg. Roads close, tents pop up, and Ferry Farm turns into a colonial-themed field day. I remember stringing green beans on twine and hanging them up, taking a turn weaving on a pedal loom, and climbing over those old wooden fences that were somehow still standing.
But before taking the trolley from downtown to Ferry Farm, my little sister and I would walk up and down every street with our parents, curious about the old coins and outfits in antique shop windows. We would get too hot, then beg our parents for snow cones and run underneath the mist tents to cool off.
It was fun for a few years, but as I got older, I outgrew it. That, and I started thinking critically. What was I actually celebrating? Why was I actually celebrating? This land didn’t belong to the English settlers about whom they taught us in public schools, and we didn’t know much about the people this land did belong to, save one trip to the river where we followed a trail and learned a few facts about the Patawomeck Tribe.
At some point in my adolescence, I stopped celebrating the 4th of July. It upset my grandmother, who used to come downtown with us when we were kids. She always told me to wear red, white and blue, but I refused for the longest time.
Her America was different than mine. She grew up post-World War II, when the United States held the promise of an American Dream. My grandfather found that promise to be true when he immigrated from Canada in the late 1950s for work, then decided to stay and become a citizen. They settled down in Northern Virginia, and built a life and a family together.
My parents understood my disdain for the Fourth more, I think. My dad grew up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, and did his own questioning about the morals of the country. He became an activist, and has always been a critical thinker. Both of my parents are. They raised us kids to think for ourselves and always seek truth and justice.
Over the years, my mom has come to me at times to acknowledge that I grew up in crazy, unpredictable times. Whenever she does this, she points out that I was born shortly after 9/11, then as a child witnessed the 2008 recession and its consequences. She points out that I was a teenage girl during Trump’s first presidency, and went to public schools with active shooter drills throughout my entire childhood. I don’t know the America she grew up being taught to believe in, and had every reason to—and certainly not the one my grandmother knew.
I don’t take my rights as an American for granted, nor the privileged position into which I was born. I believe in liberty and justice for all, but I still don’t see the government truly applying those principles to everyone in the United States.
There’s this running joke in my family that ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to leave the U.S. We have a lot of family in Canada, and my mom and I romanticized about the idea of moving up there, Maybe I’d go for university or graduate school. We looked at houses in Nova Scotia for a while in 2016, but ended up staying where we were.
Life has a funny way of working out. I did move, but not to Canada. In October 2024, I was accepted into the journalism MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. I had studied abroad in London the year before, and a friend I met then told me about the programme. In May 2025, I graduated from the University of Mary Washington, then spent the summer working, planning, and packing for my big move.
I knew that would be my last summer in the States for the foreseeable future, so decided I would join in the Fourth of July celebration as an acknowledgement of my gratitude for growing up where I did and the opportunities that afforded me. But at the end of June, I had a surgery that then put me on a two-week bedrest. My oldest sister was hosting an Independence Day party, though, and I was determined to feel good enough to go by then.
It turned out that I wasn’t. I still had compression devices hooked up to both of my legs, medicine to take, and a whole lot of recovering to do. I was bummed.
So I did the next best thing I could think of on the 4th of July: I submitted my UK Visa application.
I moved back to London last September and have built an incredible life. I’m nearly finished with my MA now, and plan to apply for my Graduate Visa once I do. It’s odd, though, that being away from home has ended up making me feel more patriotic, not less.
At one particularly homesick moment a few months into my MA, I was walking around Central London alone, which I very rarely do as I don’t like the bustle of it all. I wandered into a Brandy Melville to browse and saw a row of knit sweaters with the American flag on the front. If you had told me a year earlier that I would have bought, let alone worn, something like that, I wouldn’t have believed you. But I did, and I love that sweater.
I wore it to the pub with another American friend the day after the elections back in the States last November. We celebrated our preferred candidates winning in our home states—hers New Jersey, mine Virginia. Recently, seeing the Knicks win the NBA Championship, and all the World Cup festivities coming out of the United States, I’ve been remembering the girl who once walked around Fredericksburg on the 4th of July with a red, white, and blue snow cone. And I’m giving her grace.
One night during my study-abroad programme, I went to a pub trivia game with some other students from my building. Most of them were American fraternity brothers, and one decided to goof off and name our team “The Boston Tea Party.” That sort of humorous shamelessness, so unique to the States, is something I’m proud of.
The United States is far from perfect, but I know now that I can look beyond the government and see that multiple things can be true. I’m still hesitant to say “I’m proud to be an American,” but I’m sure proud to be from Fredericksburg. I’m proud of our local activism, our Pride Parade, our drag scene, our multiculturalism, and so much more.
It’s like the Grateful Dead said: “Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart.”
I hear your story in this, Claire, and I recognize a lot of what you describe from my own life, even though I’m looking back from nearly 80 and from five stints overseas. Each time I came home—from Viet Nam, from school in Denmark, from four years in Germany, and later from Kuwait and Bosnia—I had to re‑learn my own country, as if I were seeing it through a new lens every time. At this stage, my view of the United States holds both absolute love and gratitude for what it has made possible, and deep contempt and fear for what the current administration and the MAGA movement are trying to turn it into. Your piece reminds me that younger Americans are doing a similar balancing act from a very different starting point, and it pushes those of us with longer histories here to keep listening, and to use our added years not to lecture, but to add context and solidarity to your more recent experience.