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250705 - Resonance in a Spark

The slowest songs begin with the smallest sparks.
On a July night, chemistry becomes memory. Energy becomes identity. And even frogs answer.

The night begins—like so many others have—with fire. But this one is different. The fireworks are distant this time, their light too faint to stain the sky above me. What reaches me instead is their sound: long, slow waves of pressure, tumbling across fields, brushing through tree lines, bending the tall grass around the half-finished cabin I’m building. A celebration, yes. But also a signal. Across the wide dark, explosions echo not just as tradition, but as declarations—of independence, of joy, of memory, of presence. We’re here. We gathered. We remembered. We released energy on purpose. Sometimes for meaning. Sometimes just to marvel at the spectacle of combustion made momentarily ours.

The chemistry behind it is simple, but not simplistic. Oxidizers meet fuels in just the right stoichiometric ratios. In sparklers, the oxidizer is potassium nitrate (KNO₃)—a white crystalline salt that breaks apart with heat, releasing oxygen. That oxygen feeds a carbohydrate fuel like sucrose (C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁), common table sugar. Add in fine iron (Fe) powder, and you don’t just get heat. You get sparks—flaring particles of incandescent metal glowing orange as they burn, like stars in collapse. The formula, written plainly, sings of potential:

2 KNO₃ + C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ + Fe + heat → Fe₂O₃ + 12 CO₂ + 11 H₂O + light + heat

And that light, released at the perfect pace, is what I hold in my hand. A sparkler isn’t just a safer firework—it’s a slowed firework. The same chemistry, pulled into a longer timescale. A reaction engineered for presence. I light one, and it begins to spit and shimmer. It sounds chaotic—sparks hissing and veering—but the burn is measured. The pace is perfect. Enough to watch. Enough to write.

A sparkler burning in a dark field, its sparks mirrored by distant fireflies. A tuba rests nearby in moonlight.
Reaction Cascade, 2025. Digital photograph. A summer evening by the pond. A sparkler traces a glowing “W” into the air—light captured mid-motion. The tuba waits in stillness. Behind it all, quiet chemistry and soundwaves prepare to speak.

I remember doing this as a child—at a campground where the trees circled our RVs like quiet sentinels, and the adults handed out sparklers with that solemn, wordless nod of parental approval that felt enormous. We were entrusted with flame. Given permission to shape light. I drew patterns into the warm air—scribbled stars, looped hearts, wrote names like small spells. My letter was W. A letter I’ve grown into and wrestled with. Symmetrical, palindromic, all sharp angles and soft mystery. A gift and a riddle. Unlike others, I didn’t need to reverse it to make it face outward in light—it already did. A minor miracle of childhood coordination, simplified. In that moment, I wasn’t just playing. I was inscribing something—etching myself into the night, forward and backward. And in that glow, so were all of us. Arcing our still-forming identities through slow combustion, one looping letter at a time.

Now, decades later, I sit beside the pond near the steel cabin I’m building by hand. It’s rough still—raw metal, open seams, unfinished edges—but it shelters the tools and plans of a future I’m actively making. And from here, on this soft slope of earth, I light another sparkler. The chemistry repeats. The sparks fly. But now I see what I couldn’t see then: it’s all energy shaped into intention. Every combustion, every flicker, every molecule torn apart and remade—it all becomes signal. The difference is speed. The difference is control. From flash to word. From explosion to note.

The distant fireworks begin to fade. Their decrescendo becomes the opening measure of something older. The fireflies emerge—quiet, bioluminescent punctuation marks across the grass. Their glow comes not from heat, but from an enzyme: luciferase reacting with luciferin in the presence of oxygen and ATP. No flame. Just chemistry tuned to invisibility. A slower kind of spark. These tiny bodies announce: I’m here—not in bursts, but in flickers.

The frogs begin soon after. Not in unison. Not yet. First as scattered syllables, overlapping and unsure. Then, gradually, they align. Their pulses echo across the pond. Chirps become rhythms. Patterns emerge. They find each other in phase. These aren’t just sounds—they are messages, carried on wet air by wet circuitry. Frogs don’t simply make noise. They respond. They coordinate. Their calls are oscillators syncing in the dark, shaped by need and territory, but ultimately by resonance. They’re announcing presence, together.

I lift my tuba from the grass—its brass warm from the day’s sun. A heavy, coiled instrument. Human-made, but not sterile. It holds memory the way lungs hold air: with pressure and purpose. The bell still bears the small dents and scratches of high school competitions and concert stages, where I once won first place for a solo so rich it quieted the room. But it also remembers the cracked notes, the missed entries, the days I couldn’t find my breath. Embarrassing, beautiful, formative. The tuba has carried both my clearest tones and my most discordant failures. Music is like that—like life: a sequence of recoveries. Every note I play now folds those moments in. Friends, bands, songs we worked until our lips gave out. Pencil marks on fading sheet music. Staves like fossil records of effort. I press my mouth to the mouthpiece and breathe not to speak above the frogs, but with them. They’ve begun calling as the evening falls- in chorus and chaos. The tuba is the machine I use to exhale meaning. And this is how I say: I’m still here. I’m still trying to resonate.

At first, I play just a single note—round and low, shaped with care and sent out across the surface of the pond like a slow ripple. It’s not a challenge, not a command. It’s an offering. The frogs respond the only way they know how: they stop. For a breathless moment, the whole shoreline stills, amphibian percussion holding its breath. Then, somewhere out in the reeds, one of them chirps again—measured now. Intentional. I wait, then answer. A falling interval this time. A quiet phrase, a minor sigh shaped in brass. Not a chirp, not even a mimicry. A gesture. A question in the key of dusk.

And they let me in.

Their calls return in pulses—irregular at first, exploratory. Then, as if some hidden conductor cues them, they begin to align. Not in tone, but in time. Rhythm becomes the shared space. They chirp, I play. I rest, they reply. Our duet stretches out in cool waves. The frogs are percussion. I’m melody. Together we’re building a kind of resonance jazz, improvised and alive, our instruments tuned to the same unseen tempo—the physics of the air, the shared breath of this Earth.

This is still chemistry. Still thermodynamics in motion. Still electrons shifting and molecules vibrating and atoms releasing stored sunlight in structured ways. But the difference is architecture. More gates. More pathways. More decisions before the energy gets out. From the core of a star to the snap of a sparkler to the thrum of a throat sac to the aching tone of a tuba in a July field—it’s all the same flow of energy. What changes is the filter. Complexity layers meaning. Time gives us rhythm. Biology gives us choice.

All of us—amphibian and human, firework and firefly—become brief signposts of intention. The fireworks made their point with percussion. The fireflies lit theirs in pulse-code. The frogs, in oscillating rhythm. And I, with the strange machine of memory and brass, said something softer. All of us using chemistry to declare identity. Not to dominate, not even to impress—just to announce ourselves into the night.

We’re here. Still here. Still singing.

And in the space between notes, in the hush that follows a low chord, I heard the frogs again. Not just as echo or response. But as accompaniment. A band that never needed rehearsal. And for a moment—listening through my lungs and my bell and the wavering pond—I understood what they were saying.