These flowers are sort of like fireworks not only in shape and explosion of color but also in lasting for only a very brief time. But at least you get an entire day with the flower, whereas with a real firework, you get less than a minute. And the flowers don’t require any travelling or crowds or finding a place to park or setting out on an expedition after working all day or staying up late before having to work tomorrow. You may have guessed that I’m not going to be attending a fireworks display today, though Joe is the one working on the 4th of July, not me. This year, we’re going to stay home and admire the flowers.
I asked my endlessly inventive husband for an alternative picture idea that would still be related to fireworks. Joe immediately came up with the idea of breaking a dish and recruiting Liam to pose as the breaker about to catch an earful for carelessness. I immediately rejected this idea in my mind because I was pretty sure that I would not be able to sacrifice a dish, even in the interests of art. I’m quite attached to my dishes and cups, so much so that when one does break, it goes immediately into the milk crates I keep out by the shed, full of broken pottery waiting to be cemented into… something. For a while I thought perhaps a mosaic bench or a mosaic table, but broken china just seems too rough to make a practical, usable surface, so now I’ve fixated on the concept of cementing a mosaic to the ugly cinderblock that forms the foundation of the house. The permanence and prominence of such a project is really quite terrifying. What if it doesn’t look good? Should an entire design be planned ahead or should I just start cementing shards willy nilly and trust that a beautiful result will emerge? My internal debate on this project has continued for multiple years, though I really don’t think anything I do could look worse than the grey cinderblock. In the meantime, breakage continues, so the collection grows. But breaking something on purpose?
Since I had immediately fixated on breakage, I thought that was the firework in Joe’s idea. A breaking object is an explosion, something that goes bang, a transformation of state from whole into pieces. It was only later that I realized the fireworks in his idea was not the plate but rather the explosion from the scolder. Hmmm. When I think of fireworks, I think of something joyful and quite useless. I can see yelling as being fireworks, like the arguments Terry and I used to have regularly at the dinner table. Everyone else would get quieter and quieter as our voices got louder and louder. We argued over silly things like whether watching Family Guy was bad for your soul and whether or not living in a city was a tolerable state of being and whether or not he was stuffing too many clothes into the washing machine. It’s relatively undignified for a woman in her fifties to be squabbling noisily with a teenager, but I realized one day that we both just enjoyed yelling at each other tremendously, a fact quite lost on the tamer sons, though not at all lost on Joe. I caught him setting me and Terry up to squabble one day. He just sat back and enjoyed the show. Those joyous squabbles we had are like fireworks (though maybe a tad more fun). An angry scolding on the other hand, seems less like fireworks and more like an actual rocket’s red glare and actual bombs bursting in air.
what an essay on fireworks you have created - a good read. The shot is wonderful and I agree with you - the prettiness of the firework display but in longer lasting format. Your idea worked so well. (I couldn't have begun to make a success out of Joe's idea.
You should make pavers with your pottery and place them in your garden between the beds