Dark enough for fireworks

July 4. Launching rockets and Roman candles, cherry bombs and small firecrackers should be at dawn’s early light, explosions and streaks of fire waking everyone to the day of celebrated independence. Then the visits and barbecues, conversations and discussions lasting until night time, then a darkness sparkled and streaked, whizbangs glimmering. Twice the celebration.

For a time tonight, Priscilla and I sat at the table in the back yard while a battle of rockets and such racketed back and forth, one group to the southwest, the other southeast. The Southwesters fired a rocket or three. The Southeasters replied with Roman candles. “Ha!” said the SWesters. “You call that a fireworks display?” A spate of small rockets shot into the air, a dozen explosions sounding like a short firefight.

By now mosquitoes found Priscilla and me, buzzed near arms and ears, landed.

The SEasters, perhaps invigorated by the loudness of the SWesters’ barrage, fired a volley of their own – several Roman candles followed by dozens of firecrackers.

The noise went from direction to direction. A sudden loud sound was the same as a mortar firing, another the same as an M-79 grenade launcher, a sudden crackling the sound of M-16 rifles on full automatic.

Mosquitoes bit, were slapped away.

There was a time … Lying in the grass beneath rubber trees, arms and hands and neck and face covered with oily insect repellant, Claymores out, flares and hand grenades at hand, mosquitoes buzzed but did not land, and we waited for the bad people to walk by and we could kill them.

Now, in the back yard, fireflies blinked and flickered. I don’t remember if there were fireflies in the rubber plantations.