Rhythm and Booms -- the Midwest's largest fireworks display -- takes place about a mile from our home each year. People come from all over, of course, and fill nearby Warner Park with campers and picnic blankets. People who live in the neighborhood are likely to invite folks over for cookouts, meantime.

Ulysses and I walked up to the playground on the grassy hill on the property of the mobile home park. We danced in circles and fell on the grass (Audio track provided by Ulysses: "Dancing! Dancing! Clunk. Dancing! Dancing! Clunk."). Ulysses went down the slide a few times.

We found some soft, swishy, leafy branches under the pair of maple trees that turn firey red in the fall (first the northerly one, then the one to the south). I picked up the larger cluster-- the wood end was about 1/2" thick, and with all the slender stems and leaves shooting from it, it came to about two feet both long and wide. U picked up the other. We waved them in spontaneous semaphores, playfully batted one another with them, held them aloft.

Still holding our branches, we left the field and continued our walk. A group of fifty- and sixty-somethings were sitting out front of one of the houses. The side yard was tidy, shady and inviting, with plantings and a grill that was apparently cooking dinner, but for some reason, they had squeezed themselves and their resin chairs in the narrow slice of pavement between the house and the car parked on the roadway in front of it.

"Hello," I said as we approached. A woman said something that I couldn't hear. "What's that?" I asked.

"Are you keeping the bugs away?" she repeated,  pointing to our branches.

I hadn't noticed any bugs so far this season. "No, we're just playing," I answered. "He calls them trees," I added, "So that makes us giants, right?"

There was a pause. "Are they real?"

Now it was my turn to pause. "Yes, they're branches. Tree branches."

She looked at me blankly. "Where did they come from?"

By now we were past them. I pointed to the field a few dozen yards away, and the maple trees. "Right over there."

I was glad we were too far to talk after that.