Five Years, Two Flags, and a 4th of July That Made Me Stop and Think

📷 What I've Been Experiencing

Five Years, Two Flags, and a 4th of July That Made Me Stop and Think

This year, watching the fireworks light up the sky on the Fourth of July, I found myself doing something I hadn't quite done before.

I stopped celebrating for a second.

And I just felt it.

Five years.

Five years since we packed up a life in South Africa and started building a new one here, in America. Five years of learning a new rhythm, a new accent of everyday life, a new definition of "normal."

And this particular Fourth of July hit differently.

It wasn't just fireworks and flags and the smell of a neighbour's grill drifting over the fence. It was a quiet, unexpected moment of gratitude.

Because when you've lived somewhere long enough to stop counting the days and start counting the years, you start to see a country differently. Not as a visitor. Not as a tourist. But as someone who has, slowly and without quite noticing it, become part of the fabric of the place.

There's a particular kind of freedom here that's hard to describe until you've lived without it, or lived somewhere it isn't guaranteed in quite the same way.

The freedom to speak your mind without looking over your shoulder.

The freedom to walk your street at night and feel, mostly, safe.

The freedom to build something from nothing, simply because the opportunity exists and no one is standing in your way.

These aren't small things.

They're the kind of things you don't fully appreciate until you've lived both with them and without them.

And yet.

Gratitude for one home has never once made me love the other any less.

South Africa is still in me. It's in the way I say certain words. It's in the food I crave on a grey day. It's in the sound of a language, the warmth of a braai, the particular kind of laughter that only makes sense with people who grew up the way I did.

I miss it.

I miss the community that raised me. I miss the friends who knew me before I knew myself. I miss family gatherings where everyone talks over each other and somehow everyone still hears exactly what they need to hear.

I miss a version of home that exists now mostly in memory, because places change even when we're not there to watch them do it.

That's the strange, bittersweet arithmetic of being an immigrant.

You gain a home.

You don't lose the other one.

You just learn to carry both.

Watching the fireworks this year, I thought about patriotism. Not the loud, performative kind, but the quiet kind. The kind that isn't about a flag or an anthem, but about pride in a place that has shaped you, protected you, and given you room to grow.

I realised something.

I'm patriotic about two countries now.

Not divided between them. Not choosing one over the other.

Just proud of both.

Proud of the South Africa that built the foundation of who I am. Proud of the America that has given me the freedom to build on top of it.

One of the unexpected gifts of these five years has been the people.

Friends who started as strangers and somehow became something closer to family. People who've sat with us through hard days and celebrated the good ones like they were their own. There's a particular kind of friendship that forms when you're far from your original tribe, you find your people, and you hold onto them a little tighter because you know exactly what it took to find them.

We are lucky. We are blessed, honestly, to have found that here.

And in the same breath, that gratitude sits right alongside the ache of distance. The friends and family still in South Africa who I think about more than they probably know. The milestones missed. The hugs postponed by an ocean and a fourteen-hour flight.

Both things are true at once.

The joy of what we've found here.

The longing for what we left behind.

I don't think that tension ever fully resolves. I'm not sure it's supposed to.

Maybe that's what it means to build a life across two countries. You don't have to choose which one gets to matter. You just carry them both, a little unevenly some days, and you let gratitude and nostalgia sit at the same table.

This Fourth of July reminded me that home isn't always one place.

Sometimes it's two.

And if you're lucky enough to be loved and missed in both, that's not a complicated life.

That's a rich one.

☕ Over Coffee

Wherever you're reading this from, whether it's a braai in South Africa or a backyard barbecue here in the States, know that you matter to this story. You're part of the community that makes both of these places feel like home to me.

Have you ever had to hold two homes at once? How do you keep the connection to where you came from alive, even from a distance?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Chat laters,

Snoopy