July kicked off much like June this year, warmth and sometimes heat alternating with rain, which cools down things for a while. The threat of cicadas so noisy you can’t hear yourself think has not, at least in my little corner of the suburbs, come to much so far. We’re now getting about as much cicada noise as we do every year, focused around dusk, though perhaps beginning a little earlier in the summer than usual; early July instead of mid- or late July.

July 4 was warm and dry. And on a Thursday, which makes a de facto four-day weekend. Just the time to set off fireworks here in Illinois, where all but the most innocuous ‘works are banned. I didn’t set any off myself, but after dark took to the deck to listen to the explosions.

Somewhere not too far away, someone was setting off M-80s or some noisy equivalent every few minutes, it seemed – a little too much of a good thing, I thought, so I moved to the garage, and listened to the bangs and pops and whizzes from there, with the door open and the lights off and the cars parked outside. The surrounding structure dampened the loudest of the fiery hubbub but still allowed me to hear it all.

There was also much less chance of being hit by a shell, in case some wanker out there somewhere was shooting actual firearms. I know that happens in some places here in the USA. I’ll admit that the odds of that seem pretty slim in our suburb, even at the noisiest moments on Independence Day, but even so probably greater than they would have been only a few years ago.