fourth

the small metal square on the front of the near gate, up close to the latch, says sears. there is a similar metal square on the far gate, though less rounded as i remember, stamped with montgomery ward. the fence itself and both gates come from when your own grandparents were in their heyday, home from overseas, flush with the knowledge that conserving metals and growing their own food had led to victory. these are the gates of a country confident in its boundaries. patriotic. sure. and i know generations of children have launched bottle rockets from those very gates. i know it.

and we are here to see those we love, three of them people but plenty more animals. we are here to eat and drink together, to play music or sing or just listen to it all quietly. to laugh and talk until most everyone falls asleep, still laughing and eating, each inside our own dreams. this is a holiday. a patriotic one. one where loud people plaster everything they own with images of something once sacred, now a bumper sticker or a bikini top or a beer can logo. america. king of beers. love it or leave it. or something.

but my own parents raised me to celebrate this freedom by setting fire to the sky, streaking it with screaming explosions of light, ghosts of wars our ancestors brought us through. holding lit punk to a fuse came to me about the same time as reading, maybe even a little before. the smell of gunpowder is as familiar to my nose as the smell of a real tomato or the smell of vess red pop.


we pile into the car, the sweetie and me with the maryland folks and another missouri/new york hybrid, one we all love, one who is family the way the rest of us are family. five of us in search of food and explosives. now, if you are from new york city you get your fireworks by climbing to the roof of your own (or a friend’s) apartment building to watch the city shoot a bazillion dollars worth of pretty over the river to the tune of something sousa. or maybe you buy illegal fireworks handmade by drunks in jersey, the sort that explode when your face is right there next to the fuse, taking off an eyebrow or arm. and if you buy your fireworks in missouri you wander the vastness of an abandoned supermarket, your cart – i said your cart, my friends- rattling its one sick wheel in angry rebellion against the other three up and down aisle after glittering aisle of single pieces of explosive beauty. these are places with air conditioning, some of them, and bathrooms. because you will be drooling there for a while and they want you to be comfy. you come away from a trip to get fireworks feeling dizzy and dangerous.

so i am not quite sure what to expect when we go in search of explosives. but i can tell when we pull up to the small stand, the sort you see roadside selling honey or corn, that the sweetie’s heart is unsure. he, a desert boy, had adapted well to a missouri explosives lifestyle. the cash his mind had set aside for fireworks wouldn’t even look dented if he bought everything in the stand. it is when we all five stroll up to the counter and i see his body tense that i begin to worry. packages. all packages for the most part. i don’t want to watch so i wander off toward the place next door, toward food. he buys what he can and walks in to food with the look of a teenage girl who went out with prom dress money and returned with a t shirt.

now, here’s the thing. fireworks are fireworks. i know there are differences and some, say a monkey drive or a roman candle, are more captivating than others. but the truth is setting that smoking punk to the end of a fuse, hearing the sparking just as you see the bubbling of light, is the same thrill no matter what is at the other end of the fuse. and i have always known that, which is why my own tendencies are toward bottle rockets. hundreds of tiny moments of electrified air and skin and breath.

the grill is blazing and people begin to arrive. the adults eat and drink but the small children, completely uninterested in the stillness of grown folks, rip of their clothes and run naked through a sprinkler, squealing their tiny selves into delirium. we sit in lawn chairs waiting for the sun to stop. it does not get dark for a long time. there are bats and a few fireflies and we walk over to the road with lighters and explosives and cameras and each other. most of the things we have are fountains. but these are not the fountains of our childhoods. these are celebrations of fire. these are beautiful. we light them one after another and they scream and burn and hiss and explode. we are victorious. we have lit the dark sky and everything is wrapped in
smoke and smelling of gunpowder.

the sweetie has heard stories of a sparkler bomb and although we are clearly underbudget on sparklers, we decide to make something with them anyway. there is a flurry of activity and they are wrapped in duct tape and set to rest in a bucket in the road. a lone sparkler sticks itself out above the others, a fuse. there is fire. sparkling and sizzling, baconish. it gets wilder and fierier and then it settles. the thin wires glow and hum a while longer, glowing right through the metal of the bucket. we stand around it in a circle, patriots, watching the very last bit of light.