Friday, July 4, 2025

This is the sixty-sixth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Today is American Independence Day! I don’t normally talk about politics on here (ptah!), and I’m not going to do it now, but I will take a moment to be grateful that I live in a country where I can even be here writing this to you all right now. Our government has a lot of flaws, I’ll admit, but it’s a sight better than many other places around the world.

We live near Pekin, Indiana (not in it, since town boundaries are weird around here), which is a tiny little town that boasts the oldest consecutive Fourth of July celebration in the country, having started in 1830. They did their fireworks show last night, probably to avoid competing with surrounding towns this evening, especially Louisville. We got nearly front-row seats, having parked in a lot just 1500 feet away from the epicenter.

So, will there be a Frontier Flora story about a planter struggling to keep their Florabeast calm during the Independence Day fireworks? Probably not. See, the United States of America doesn’t really exist in their world. On the World Anvil front page, it does say “The Colonies may have gained their independence, but the New World is still a trackless frontier full of both dangers and delights.”

This is backed up in A Christmas Corral, where it’s clear that Sal served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War against Brittania, but that doesn’t mean that the colonies then turned around and formed a unified government. Larger settlements like Drygrass are largely independent themselves, using a city-state type of governance rather than organizing under the federal system. There are also mentions of coins like nickels, but Jenie could have also paid her boat fare in gold or silver.

People in the coastal colonies might still celebrate their independence with fireworks and feasts, but out on the Frontier they need all their gunpowder to fight off the Gasts that keep encroaching on safe territory.

Oh, and there’s a Florabeast in here too! The third “starter,” representing strength over the Celereagle’s speed and the Skunion’s… smell? That’s why they call them S. Attacks, after all.

Stay safe and have fun!