You could still hear the cicadas after the fireworks and after the rain, and their carapaces were there to be discovered all around this neighborhood where one also finds a lot of abandoned cars. Roger Dean would draw you an abandoned car that looks like a giant robot cicada, and you can probably find something just like that at the head shop down the street, the one named after an imaginary planet, where the owner puts on his own private pyrotechnics show every July 4, celebrating his freedom to put big Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul signs up next to each other. I found myself wondering, when the explosions finally stopped, why it seems like there aren’t as many cicadas as there used to be, and whether that’s another sign of nature paying the price for our Promethean bargain, or just an anachronistic imposition of my memories of childhood in a more cicadian climate.