Fireworks in Town

It’s Sunday night of the roundup days weekend here in town and I’m sitting up late waiting for the fireworks to start. I get a grand view from my house which is fun because I can sip some wine, nibble on cheese and basically hide indoors if the wind comes up, which seems to be the case this year.

I’m not really sure why we have fireworks on this particular weekend other than the fact that it has become the traditional reunion weekend for folks here in town. I believe a great many of the small towns around Alberta do some special event on a particular weekend and this just happens to be the one for us.

I remember when I was a kid we had firecrackers going off on the Victoria Day weekend although my parents never allowed us to have any. We enjoyed hearing them go off in the night but rarely did we see any fireworks. Towns didn’t have money for those kinds of things I suppose. When I think about it WWII was only 18 years in the past when I was 10 years old. We were very fortunate to be living in Canada and just getting into the age of prosperity but there were still a lot of things that were special. Not everyone had a telephone in their home, in fact we didn’t get a telephone until I was 7 years old and we kids weren’t allowed to use. I was a teenager before I ever used the telephone to phone a friend. Can you imagine how kids would feel about that today? Amazingly I’m living proof that one does not need a cell phone to survive childhood.

In my neighbourhood we had sidewalks on both sides of the street and we also had boulevards separating the sidewalks from the road. Nowadays only one side of the street seems to get a sidewalk and boulevards seem to be a thing of the past. Both sides of houses had a side yard and it was mandatory that everyone had a driveway. There was no parking on the streets and homes only had one car, if they even had a car. Most of the families in our neighbourhood had more than two kids in the family (and they weren’t Catholics). Mothers stayed home; there were no working mothers in our neighbourhood. We hadn’t heard of divorce and everyone had a father.

It was a huge event when the area got a public swimming pool and then a skating rink. And girls actually got to skate in the rink any time they wanted to. Organized hockey for boys hadn’t evolved yet. In those days, boys played hockey on the ice on a natural pond. Parents never came around to interfere in games. We made up our own games of scrub and British Bulldog and kick-the-can. Parents weren’t referees. We didn’t want to go in the house except to sleep when it got dark.

P.S. The fireworks didn’t start until 11:00 and they were spectacular. This is my shot.