It turned out that we didn’t need to find a distanced vantage point to last night’s Freedom over Texas spectacle downtown. All we had to do was to step out into our own street to see some fireworks.

There were rockets aplenty lighting up the skies above our neighborhood. Unplanned pockets of firework enthusiasts erupted all around us. Erratic bursts of crackling, pops and booms came from over the fence, down the road and through the trees.

The sounds and sites took me back many decades before sensible city ordinances put the kibosh on backyard July 4th celebrations. It was heart-warming.

A few days ago I remember wondering if the number of PSAs about firework restrictions inside the city limits was on the increase this year, or am I just paying closer attention to the news? I didn’t think that much about it until the sun was setting on our evening walk and we started hearing some pops here and there. Aha! Some smart person somewhere was tipped off — hence the PSAs. How did they know?

Yes! It’s going to be more interesting tonight than we expected. How exciting. I’m completely onboard with all our normal safety measures, and I hope that nobody was injured last night. But, we needed a collective expression of some measure of “freedom” on a hot balmy night when a mask order had just been declared, gatherings of more than 10 had been banned and the parks had been closed.

So when the firework symphony got into full swing after dark, we put on our masks, and strolled through the dark streets. What a festival of sparkles in the sky and a liberating sense that we’d taken something back that had been taken away from us.

A little bit of magic returned to the day. July 4th, 2020 didn’t turn out as deadly dull as expected.

The only thing that would have made it even better would have been having my own sparkler to run around with on the lawn making pretty patterns in the night. Remember doing that?