Fourth of July as I remember them

My earliest Fourths were remembering how my mother loved breakfast picnics at the Park. We would go out and my parents would build a fire and get out the skillet and scramble eggs. As I got older I remember having lady fingers in a can. My uncle always bought our fire crackers. Since he was a druggist that is confusing. I remember one evening my older relatives were doing Roman candles and one that my sister, Ethel, was holding broke in half. That stopped night works for a few years. When I visited China I would watch the children fixing lady fingers and took movies that I thought I could run backwards after I got home so I would be able to see how to get the ladyfingers apart easier. After I was married and had five children, Ray would get the fireworks from Wald's wholesale and the children each had a can with firecrackers in them. One year we had a fancy thing that you put a cap in and it was a bird and it flew. Sally was playing with hers in the backyard and it sailed up onto the roof. Ray got the ladder out and did not check where he put it so it slid and he fell and broke his leg. Our family doctor was out of town so we called his fill-in. The ambulance took him to St Mary's Hospital where they sat his leg and kept him for awhile. That year we fired the night works a week later. That got the police involved and we found out about permits. From then on we always had a permit. One year Ray was in the hospital with a bad asthma attack. We shot the fireworks anyway but had the police to inspect our permit twice. The kids thought their dad was turning us in. After Ray died I tried to get a permit but they would not let me have one so we were back to sparklers.