So much has happened in this family, since the loss of our guiding star. But life goes on, and so do we.

All of us — two daughters and one writing father — have important jobs and deadlines. So we begin.

Monday, July 29: I go to our local cleaners, Grondin’s (the ONLY dry cleaners we have, to my knowledge, in Waterville) to retrieve my really huge
American flag.

I had believed that this is the one they put over my father’s coffin when he passed way back in the late 1930s.

It wasn’t. This flag that someone passed around over the years is big enough to cover the coffins of the entire honorable dead of the 101st Airborne in two wars.

Now, as I am the sole Devine still alive, it wound up here, safely, in our attic.

J.P. Devine stands next to “Old Glory,” unfurled over a car. Photo courtesy of J.P. Devine

OK. Now, I kept planning over the 40 years since we moved here to take it down to Grondin’s. Over those 40 years, I somehow planned to do 106 things that never got it done.

And so there it sat. No, it didn’t. Dozens of hands in the family moved, I suppose, this flag from St. Louis to family members across the country that the flag represented, until suddenly it appeared here in Waterville.

This flag — this huge, honorable, red, white and blue flag — suddenly appeared in our attic where someone, nobody knows who (because everyone, five brothers and three sisters, all but this fella, have passed on), placed it.

So I found it, all wrapped up in a twisted bundle in a torn bag.

It was a mess. I’m convinced that this really big, massive, gigantic flag, couldn’t be the one that survived my father’s end days.

I spread it out over our Prius out in the driveway in the sun to examine it.

There it was, the stars and stripes, Old Glory, hallowed banner of our country, full of flotsam and jetsam, whatever that means, and feathers of various birds and unknown creatures.

So down I took it down to Grondin’s Cleaners and was told it would cost me 65 bucks to launder.

I was stunned. I was told that Old Glory was laundered for free because it’s Old Glory, our American banner.

It seems someone at Grondin’s Cleaners decided that so many of our flags (and I’m proud to hear that there are so many of them) were being washed every year, so the owners had to start charging for their care, and my flag’s size clocked in at 65 bucks.

Well, I can’t afford to spend 65 bucks each year to launder my stars and stripes. I need that 65 bucks to clean my sweaters when winter comes.

So, I will have to stick my Star Spangled Banner, wherever it waved, in my washing machine. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.