The country club near my house has fireworks every year, usually the day before July 4th. An impressive, professional show. We can see them from our deck.
There's something that always gets to me about this show, though. What it sounds like.
The colored lights of fireworks are pretty, they always have been and always will be. But the thing about the way this show sounds is that it's the closest thing to some weird, I dunno... memories? Psychic foo? I am not sure I even have a word for how and why I know the stuff I do about it. My grandfather? My spirit guides from Germany? I have no idea.
Where I live is very hilly. The area was once all referred to by the Native American name Matenicock, which means "very hilly place". It also looks a hell of a lot like where I was stationed in Germany.
Most fireworks shows on Long Island are shot off over either the ocean or LI Sound, so the water absorbs the noise. This one echoes off the hilly land. The echoes are what freak me out.
I realize from the pretty colors that what I'm hearing is not what I'm seeing, but... there's a part of me that hears it and REMEMBERS... something else. I find myself remembering the foxhole that I tripped and fell into behind my house in Kaiserslautern, cutting my hand on barbed wire that had been wrapped around a sapling (now a tree) 50 years before. The tree had grown AROUND the barbed wire. They were now forever one thing.