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THIS IS WHAT I REMEMBER about the July Fourth when I was 12. The sweet, hot smell of clover and newly mown hay. My uncles in their undershirts, smoking cigars. The rough, pungent stink of smoke and sweat and beer mixed with their laughter and curses, and the slippery taste of cold, tangy potato salad. The delicate magic of light and fire against a wide-eyed, indigo prairie sky.

My three uncles, my aunt, and their families from the big city were coming home to small-town North Dakota to celebrate. All my life I'd heard how handsome and how smart these relatives were. As I sat on the roof of the grain elevator office awaiting their arrival, I wondered what they would think of me. Then I saw their cars, dust billowing behind, the sun fracturing off the car roofs, making me squint. Sliding down, I trotted behind, all the way to Grandma's house. My uncles brought bags of fireworks‹firecrackers, snakes, sparklers, bottle rockets, cherry bombs, and a big box marked "Deluxe Special." They set up a fireworks show at the baseball field and invited the whole town to watch that night.

There were seven cousins about my age, five of them boys. We lit off what seemed like a million firecrackers during the afternoon—in pipes, under tin cans and cow pies. The men spent the day sitting in a circle of chairs on our lawn, drinking beer and listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio. We returned to our fathers again and again, racing each other, looking to see if they'd noticed us. The last time, we gathered around my Uncle Bill. He looked hard at his son, "Hell, I bet this girl could take you down and sit on you." There was a sudden silence. "Go ahead," he said, grinning at me, gesturing to all the boys, "I'll give you a quarter for every one."

I jumped on the nearest dumbstruck cousin and pinned him in a flash. The men roared with laughter. One by one, some harder than others, all five cousins fell under my desire to be the strongest, the best, the richest. I was hot and sweaty, but triumphant as I collected my $1.25.

"Chip off the old block," my father said, grinning. A profound sense of pride made me turn away from my tall, skinny cousin Bobby, who was crying.

The night dropped out of the sky as smooth and hot as a second skin and my uncles started the show. Golden fountains high as the cottonwood tree. Green balls of fire exploding in all directions. Clouds of white sparkles raining down. The crowd oohed and aahed together as if they were singing a Sunday hymn. At the end, a tiny American flag twinkled red, white, and blue on the ballpark fence, flanked by golden, fizzing pinwheels. Everyone clapped and whistled. It was grand. The next day, my mother was furious at how unladylike I'd been. She made me apologize to everyone and give each boy the quarter Bill had given me. It was my last Fourth of July as a child. By the next year, I'd begun to feel self-conscious running wild with the boys and though I lit a couple of firecrackers, that brimming abandon, that unbearable, exquisite excitement was gone.

I never saw those cousins again. My grandma died the next spring and my grandpa went into a nursing home. Forty years later, the men who sat in that circle are dead and gone.

But every year I think of those moments of belonging and triumph and humiliation. I wish I could say I'd learned my lesson about the price of approval. The truth is that even today, as a middle-aged woman knowing full well how wrong so much of it was, I am still gripped by the remembrance of my fierce longing to be loved and accepted by that circle of men.

I watch the State Capitol fireworks each year, usually from some side street where the memories from long ago resonate and flow into the sounds crowding around me. As the sky comes alive with light and the voices rise in answer, I reach up and draw down that brightness, gathering it around me one more time. MM

Sonjie Johnson is a rehabilitation counselor for the state of Minnesota and a free-lance writer.