For me Saturday was a glorious day of yard work, hauling two dozen bags of Lowe's mulch around, planting flowers in a newly reclaimed hillside and continuing my perpetual assault on the grapevines and multiflora rose that used to cover it.
In the evening my fellow laborer and I hobbled out to a late dinner at Wendy's (salad for me, some hearty combination of bacon, beef and cheese for him) and then went food shopping at the Walmart. As we were checking out (love how the recorded voice at the self-checkout drawls "ahh-tem" for "item") we heard loud booms from outside the store.
What could it be but Longwood Gardens fireworks!
Out in the parking lot we could see the really high fireworks but saw just flashes from the lower-altitude ones, so we drove down to the SuperFresh shopping center to get a better view. We weren't the only ones: a few dozen people were sitting out in lawn chairs enjoying the show. We learned from a woman who works in the shopping center that whenever Longwood has fireworks, experienced fireworks fans start showing up in the lot at around 9 p.m.
The 45-minute display (with a few breaks, we assumed for musical interludes and the fountain show) was fantastic, with some types of pyrotechnics I'd never seen before: cascading ones; ones that just hover in the air as if they have parachutes; and a multicolored burst that looked like the blue, green and red lights on a Christmas tree. My favorites, of course, were the loud ones, of which there were many; friends in downtown Kennett and in Embreeville heard them, and family members who live near Longwood said their house shook.
The view wasn't perfect, of course; you need to be a paying customer at Longwood for that, understandably enough. But what an unexpected end to a very happy and productive day!
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