Frogs Over Fireworks

For those of you not from around here, you should know that Cabot’s July 4th parade is kind of a big deal. I can’t say for sure how many people were crowded along Main St yesterday, but it had to have been pushing a couple thousand. There are puppets and pageantry (Bread & Puppet always makes an appearance), fire engines and tractors, dancing and dirt bikes. The boys were invited to ride on Lynn and Martha’s float, titled “Make Hay IF the Sun Shines.” They dressed in head-to-toe rain gear and armed themselves with squirt guns they’d cobbled together out of syringes, electrical tape, and cast-off pieces of wood. Believe it or not, the damn things shoot water better than any store bought (or as the boys are fond of saying, “boughten”) squirt gun I’ve ever seen, and the fellas were in their element, having been granted permission to spray at will.

Later in the day, we had some friends over for burgers and beers and Jason’s phenomenal potato salad and whatnot, and we cooked down by the pond until it started raining in earnest, at which point we retreated to the house. It had the look of a settled storm, but at 7, the clouds parted and those who remained sashayed back down to the pond and we swum and talked until dark, swatting blood-fat mosquitos and hearing the boys’ goats snicker and shuffle as they bedded down for the night

At 8:30 or so, just as it was beginning to look as if dark would finally prevail, the tree frogs started singing, and for the next half-hour or so, we were serenaded by amphibians. Then the booming reverberations of the neighboring towns’ fireworks show began, and the singing stopped.

Ya know what? I’ll take frogs over fireworks any day of the year.