Fireworks, Yard Sales, and Rooftop Bars
Another warm summer week has come and gone in our little city as we ambled toward the Fourth of July (and its vaguely irritating cousin, the 24th). A surprise afternoon rainstorm threatened to put a damper on the day — but South Jordan skies, like South Jordan residents, tend to clear up when fireworks are on the line.
Sweat isn’t the only thing suddenly appearing in nooks and crannies across South Jordan; fireworks vendors, in their typically garish and ramshackle tents, have also sprung up overnight. They’re hawking low-grade munitions with names like The Patriotizer or Big Boomer, as if designed by a teenager with access to clip art and caffeine. Their presence will be a constant for the next month — until, one day, they vanish as mysteriously as they arrived. In the meantime, we’ll be keeping an eye on them and staying vigilant for the inevitable errant firework and its natural consequence: a blown-off finger.
Lessons of the Fourth
The late-night sounds of fireworks (well past local ordinances, of course) aren’t the only noises echoing through our neighborhoods this week. Explosions have a habit of triggering the smallest and perhaps most vocal among us: namely, very small children and barking pets. The latter can be soothed by a watchful owner, but the former present a challenge. Children often want to join the festivities but lack the years — and cautionary tales — that adults accumulate with age. So along with the startled cries from surprise explosions, we get the shrieks of kids learning the hard way what happens when you grip a sparkler just a second too long or inch too close to a hissing aerial.
Still, these are valuable rites of passage. At least, they used to be. Judging by some of the adults spotted this week, a fair number seem to have missed those early-life tutorials altogether. But we’ll keep our judgments to ourselves — until about 1:00 a.m., when every backyard pyrotechnician becomes a mortal enemy.
Sales by the Yard
Also making a seasonal appearance: yard sale signs creeping up stoplight poles and electrical boxes like ivy, but louder and with worse spelling. Each one seems to promise an event of great urgency — ONE DAY ONLY, TODAY ONLY, HUGE SALE – NOW! — often appearing on some lazy weekday morning, demanding immediate action, only to linger long past relevance.
We’re left to imagine an unending yard sale, trinkets and antiques emerging one by one in a slow procession. In reality, of course, most offer a sun-bleached collection of 1990s stuffed animals and orphaned VHS tapes, eventually returned to their basement caves to await the next go-round. Maybe someday they’ll sell — but we suspect they’re destined to tour yard sales forever, like the cursed objects they are.
Rooftop Rumors
Something’s brewing in South Jordan — possibly beer, possibly outrage. Progress has taken our city by the hand in recent years, and the march of mixed-use development continues. One bit of gossip making the rounds this week involves a possible rooftop bar being planned as part of one of these new projects.
South Jordan is no stranger to bars — The Break is a longtime favorite that has even managed to spawn spinoffs. But a rooftop bar? That’s practically metropolitan. And while some residents are curious, others seem scandalized. Critics tend to cite the “golden age” of the city — when it was more fields than families — as the ideal. Still, one can’t ignore that South Jordan, having grown all it can outward, is now growing up. Literally.
As for our verdict? We’ll withhold judgment until we know how swanky the hypothetical rooftop bar really is — and how elegant we’d look sitting in it.