The good news about the Fourth of July is that, as I did last year, I made another delicious cherry pie and shared it with my friends. I’m stocking up on fresh sour cherries at the farmers’ market while they’re in season; most of them are going into the freezer, but a goodly number are going into things we can eat right away. Being, you know, from the north and all, I grew up on cherry pie and am more than happy to bake pies myself just so I can have my favorite dessert whenever I want. This year, I used Gourmet‘s recipe and didn’t bother to make a lattice top as I did last year with the Bon Appétit version. (Both can be found on Tastebook or Epicurious; I prefer Tastebook but not every likes to create a login in order to search.) So, cherry pie, that was good.

The bad news about the Fourth of July is that I went to the College Park fireworks on the University of Maryland’s campus and got hot ash in my eye. We had already moved our blankets farther away from the barrier because a flaming piece of debris caught our bag on fire after nearly landing on my partner’s upturned face. (Not that we were particularly close to start, as I don’t really enjoy fireworks that much; I’m with the eight year old who walked by and said, ‘Mommy, that sounds like guns!’) Anyway, when the ash blew into my eye I poured half my water bottle over my face to try to flush it, but it was still burning and stinging so we went to the paramedics (or EMTs, whichever are the firefighter ambulances rather than the hospital ambulances). A very nice firefighter named Lauren and an older guy whose name I didn’t catch flushed my eye with the official eye-flushing stuff and it went from burning to just feeling like I’d gotten a stick in my eye. Once home—at this point we left, as you might imagine I wasn’t in the most nationalistic of moods anymore—I called our medical advice nurse and she told me that I would be fine since I didn’t have either searing pain or loss of vision, but just to be safe I should stand in the shower and let the water run into my eye while blinking for five minutes. Five minutes is a crazy long time to have water running over your eyeball; I managed two. The first minute I was distracted by the burning in my previously non-flushed eye, which was parched from the smoke at the fireworks and the chlorine at the pool earlier. After that, it was just a matter of white-knuckling it through the creepy feeling for as long as possible, which wasn’t very long in my case.

Happily, my fear that I would wake up the next day not able to see did not come to pass. I can see, and my eye feels no worse than when a twig of a low-bridge town tree gets me in the eye in the dark. (You would think glasses would provide a tad more protection, but apparently not.) However, attending local fireworks displays will now join driving on the Garden State in the category of Never Doing That Again As Long As I Live So Help Me God.