Another Day in the Country
Light up the sky
© Another Day in the Country
It was a quiet Fourth of July in Ramona, my hometown. No parade was planned this year, and no extra guests were expected. But there were going to be fireworks that evening, choreographed by the volunteer fire department again this year, and that was exciting to contemplate. Those guys do such a good job!
“Let’s put the lawn chairs in the back of the truck,” I said to my family, “and we can back the truck up to the railroad tracks like we did last year. That was so much fun.”
This was my grandson’s first Fourth of July in Ramona in some time.
There is just something so rural American about sitting in the back of a pickup truck, beside a dirt road, watching fireworks. It sounds like a theme for a country song.
While we were cleaning out the back of the truck, gathering chairs, and checking to see who had the keys, the fireworks started popping.
“It’s not even dark yet!” I cried. “Hurry up, you guys, so we can find a spot.”
How hard can it be to find a spot by the tracks in Ramona, population ±100? There wasn’t likely to be a traffic jam. Once settled, we just leaned back and watched the pyrotechnics.
It was a perfect country scene: wide-open prairie, still blue skies, pickup trucks, a four-wheeler buzzing by.
By the time the darkness truly descended, quite a few onlookers had gathered, and right on cue, Jeannie was there handing out for all the younger set bracelets that glowed in the dark.
“You want one?” she asked, waving in our direction.
Last year, a train came through in the middle of the fireworks exploding, and I hoped for a repeat performance, but no luck.
The train is such a constant part of our lives here in town — whistling all day and into the night, stopping on the tracks and blocking our entrance or exit, calling out during services at the cemetery — that it seemed as if something was missing for engines to not be racing through the fireworks display in the dark of night, adding their two bits’ worth to the celebration.
I found myself holding my breath after every particularly beautiful burst of fireworks, hoping that this was not the end of the show.
When it was over, I said to my sister, “Would you drive the truck — take the long way home — so Dagfinnr and I can just sit back here and enjoy the view.”
“What’s the long route?” Dagfinnr wanted to know.
I told him it was code for touring the town.
“Ramona is bigger than I thought,” he said as Jess drove up and down the streets.
“Oh, that’s a nice-looking place,” my grandson called out as we turned the corner onto B St. “Who lives there?”
It’s surprising how quickly you can tour a town when it’s only five blocks square.
Our driver did slow down when we went over the WPA bridge on 5th St. so we could peer back into the trees to see myriad fireflies that gather down by the creek to do their mating rituals, but she wasn’t interested in running the route again.
Dogs barked, and cats cowered as fireworks continued to go off spasmodically around town.
We went indoors to play another game of wingspan, golf, or rummy. We love playing games.
A few days later, I took my grandson to Wichita to catch a flight to Southern California, where he was meeting his parents to go to orientation at Cal Poly, where he’ll be attending college.
I wondered as we drove how many more summers he’ll be free to spend time in Ramona, as he has since he became a teenager.
Once he started first grade, his mother went to work full time, so it was me making a trip to California to spend the summer with him while his parents worked.
Years flew by as they tend to do, and then these last few summers he’s been spending time here in Ramona.
He always seemed to arrive with some assignment from a teacher — books to read or words to memorize to evaluate literature.
I read some of the books, too, and went through the word list with him, testing our acumen.
I jokingly called his time devoted to studying “office hours” while he worked on one summer class or another.
“This is summer vacation,” I complained. “Kids should be playing, not studying, in the summer — especially when visiting grandparents.”
However, all those “office hours” paid off when he got to orientation and discovered that he had enough credits that he was entering his first year of college as a sophomore.
It happens every time I drive loved ones to the airport, drop them off, and head home to a very quiet house.
I have to be thankful, look to the future, and the next time they’ll return to spend another day in the country.