Laundry Room with a View, After Pyrotechnics

This is what I see while folding clean teeshirts and undies. It has to be the best view in the world for doing laundry. I know there's a poem here but lately I find myself more attracted to the visual image, the immediacy of my little digital camera. I could say I'm lazy, but on this Saturday morning I'm too calm and happy for guilty self-defaming. A photo is a moment. Right now, a lovely one.

Doing laundry, as usual, is a welcome meditation, after last night's raucous Pedro fireworks. We sat on the balcony sipping what I'll call pom-agne, or, how about champ-egranate, a red blend of pomegranate juice and champagne, while the crazy neighbors down the hill shot off hours of their ill-gotten booty. Then we watched the "legitimate" show at Cabrillo Beach, also catching blooms from the Queen Mary across the harbor and even, in the hazy distance, Newport Beach.

Holly remembered a place in Missouri called Boomland where her family always used to stop and shop on their way home from vacation. I remembered one out in the woods of Central Ohio near my parents' nursing home. In both cases, we loaded trunks with giant fireworks and guiltlessly spirited them back to Michigan. I used to charge mine, enjoying going into debt for pyrotechnics. So much more colorful than, say, a washer and dryer!

Holly said Boomland blew up. Which seemed funnily appropriate. It happened in 2005 and they built another one, I see on Google. I'm not sure about the place in Ohio. Like the steakhouse and bar down the street from my parents' Tara-like last residence, the pole barn stacked with Iraq-sized pyrotechnics offered explosive relief from the gloom of my parents' decline. It was sort of like, mortality sucks, let's light a 36-Shot Happy! Once we tried to put on a show with our boomers at the pond behind The Home. We rolled my mother in her wheelchair through the grass to watch. The whole thing made her nervous and, after picking up the shreds of burnt cardboard and blackened fuses, we chalked it up as a possibly good-hearted but failed gesture.

My taste for the noise, especially, has subsided. I still think mortality sucks. Old age isn't looking all that great either. But like a photo, fireworks celebrate bright, brief moments. As Dennis said last night, "it's quite an art, to make that happen so fast, and then it's over." We wondered about the people who design them. They must have an amazing appreciation for the possibilities of five seconds of life in the dark.