Years ago, I spent a 4th of July in Lubbock, Texas. I’ve never forgotten it. I was with my brother and his family and we ended up on a football field in the middle of a huge crowd. Everywhere you looked there were families spread out on blankets. Little kids in red white and blue shirts with melted ice cream adding extra interest to their cute outfits. Coolers full of plastic bagged sandwiches and icy cans of coke. Moms wearing sunglasses and carrying on conversations while keeping each child on their radar. When any kid wandered too far the dads got an elbow in the ribs and they would chase them down dodging other dads doing the same thing. Eventually when the sun set and the fireworks started, I remember stealing a moment to look at all of the faces around me. Each turned up to the beautiful display above us. The lights catching on their features and making them beautiful too. When the song ‘What a Wonderful World’ started to play, I cried. It was the most American I had ever felt. Going to Mount Rushmore affected me the same way. There is something truly magic about standing in a crowd of people looking up at those craggy faces. In being one of them. You shuffle through the little museum and hear the stories about how they made it happen. The painstaking process. You look at the pictures and tell the person you’re with, “I just can’t believe they hung off the side of a mountain!” They answer, “I can’t believe the precision. They even added the glasses!” You both shake your heads and continue reading the placards and calling out facts to each other. Every once in a while, you make eye contact with a stranger and you both shake your heads in wonder. Later in the little dark theatre, you get a lump in your throat when you hear the entire thing was a nod to American exceptionalism. A love letter from a group of men who labored fourteen years to make it happen. They hooked themselves into belts and pulleys and detonated dynamite to create something for everyone who would come after them. For me. They gave me that sunny August afternoon with my husband. The one where we got to be proud Americans. Unabashedly proud. We stopped under the flag from each state we’ve lived in to take a picture. We went in the gift shop and bought magnets and red white and blue souvenirs for our grandsons. We took hundreds of pictures from every angle and we talked about how much we love America. We talked about it a lot. She is a big messy experiment that means everything. To us. To the men that created Mount Rushmore. To the crowd of people enraptured on that field in Lubbock, Texas all those years ago. To the world. I just have to remember that as I get another text message from a politician and try to survive these last 18 days until the election. Here’s hoping that whatever this election brings it continues us on the same path that Mount Rushmore has been illuminating for the last eighty-three years.