Well, Sweet Jesus, What's the Fourth Without A Little Red?

Continuing tales of harrowing Island life:

The Fourth of July just isn't my bag. And after the fire, I wasn't really feeling pip pip and full of patriotic pep. I've got a guilt hangover, seeing as I am partially responsible for the tank truck not being full (refilling it had been assigned to me and Marshall). Yes, the fire department salvaged more of the house than expected, but even more could have been saved if we'd had high flow from the get-go.

I'm also an introvert in a state of recovery; it'd been over two weeks of living with an intense extrovert and a crew of workers knocking about the house, as well as the influx of summer people on the island. Like Garbo, I just vanted to be alone.

I did perch myself on the new railings of the porch, coffee in hand, to watch the parade go by. It took approximately five minutes. Brevity is the soul of wit.

I spent the rest of the day puttering and greedily grasping at the sunshine: I did laundry so I could finally use my new laundry line (old school spinning square variety, so you can hide your dainties on the inner lines, and cloak them with less personal articles on the outer lines); I also hoped to dry out my mouldering soul by sunbathing; I made pies. All along, I was dreading the fact I would have to go out to party simply to keep up appearances.

At long last, it was time to head out, the pies had cooled and I could no longer put off my social obligations. I called for a ride, and the guy who arrived to escort me was one I had not seen since the summer before, when he had stumbled drunkenly into my darkened house, up my stairs, and into my room, because he wanted to continue the evening's conversation. On the brief drive over, he noted that one of the things I'd said to him last summer stuck- "you know, you could choose to be awesome." Two months ago he decided to stop drinking.

He also brought me up to speed on what I had missed at the party; who was there, what had gone on. It was about 6:30 at this point, and a friend he'd brought out had already sliced a good chunk of his own thumb off while cutting a lemon. When it became apparent that the bleeding wasn't going to stop readily, they'd given him a couple of options: they could call the EMT, or they could cauterize it.

It's the island.

So they cleaned a poker up, heated it with a blow torch, gave him rope to bite on, and three of them held him down.

Yep.

When I got there, he didn't have a lot of color, but the alcohol they deemed it fair to give him seemed to have dimmed the pain. Over the course of the evening he looked less and less waxy. The EMT did eventually migrate to the party, and upon examining the injury, pulled the self-appointed medics aside to tell them "you didn't even cauterize it, you just burnt the shit out of it! But it'll be fine if he just keeps it clean."

When it got dark and fireworks started to go off, a bunch of us headed up to the top of the house, where there's a small platform on the peak, which affords just about a 360 degree view- there are no handy stairs to the platform (interior or exterior), but there are ropes rigged to help a person scale to the ridgepole, once you've climbed off the second floor deck and out onto the roof.

Yeah, I am afraid of heights, but there was a jerry-rigged rope. A girl's got to have a sense of adventure. And I got to watch fireworks from the following towns: Stonington, Someplace not Blue Hill But In That Vicinity, Swan's Island, MDI, Vinalhaven, Camden, and other less obvious hamlets. There were of course also the fire works on the Island being shot off by my 13 year old former student.

After the fire works were over, I scrambled back down, recovered my beer, and rejoined the party. It was not too long after, when the next injury walked through the door, this man bleeding from a head wound. We're really not a vicious people, just an accident prone people (though I would point out that no one was injured in the shimmying up and down the roof). Two guys had been wrasslin' outside, and Linc lacerated his scalp on a rock. It was just as well that the EMT had moved to our party.

By eleven I extricated myself, and my timing was pretty impeccable- three whole beers into the night, I was tipy enough to be singing House of the Rising Sun, but sober enough to be singing it under my breath. The moon was nearly full, the sky had yet to cloud over with rain. It was the first moonlit walk I'd had in a long time, June not being a terribly cooperative month in terms of allowing us to see stars, planets, and satellites.

This morning I was up bright an early to take out trash, and was just deliberating whether or not to go to the cafe, when my early-morning cafe buddy drove by in his flatbed Model T: I threw up my bedroom window sash, leaned out and yelled his name- his hearing must be good, because by the time I'd grabbed my wallet, slipped into sandals, and skipped down stairs, he'd backed into my driveway.

So it was that I found myself in a bouyant mood on this sunlit fifth of July, double fisting coffee and hot cocoa, and eating doughnuts fresh from the fryolator.