Fireflies

  Fireflies begin to appear right around the first evening of summer and they seem to get more active in subsequent weeks.  Maybe it’s just me, but I find their numbers peak around the Fourth of July.  By the second week of August, you don’t see them very much.  Someone can research this with just a few mouse clicks, I’m sure.  Knock yourself out.  I read somewhere that we have fireflies on the West Coast, but they lack the luminescent component of their eastern relatives.  Kind of makes sense that the part of the country which gave rise to the smokeless cigarette market is also the habitat for the fireless firefly.  Yeah, we take a different approach to a lot of things around these parts.  Much time has been spent brooding over those differences lately.    In another week, it will be a year to the day that I embarked on a solo cross-country drive back to California.  It was supposed to be a family trip, but a last-minute snafu with the movers forced the X2B and Li’l GUN to stay behind for a few weeks.  On the one hand, I was looking forward to coming back out west.  On the other, I was embittered over the lost opportunities to reconnect with friends and family during the previous year on the East Coast.  The X never could sympathize or even understand, which made the burden that much harder to bear.  I survived only by throwing that weight into God’s capable hands months later.    I’ve spent a good portion of this week reliving the better moments of my final days on the banks of the Delaware River.  There was a creek that fed into the river and it was a favorite spot of my son’s.  Whenever we walked from the post office, he knew where that creek was and would walk to it unassisted if you let him.  He was not even two yet.    I wonder if the memory of throwing pebbles into that creek on some lost Father’s Day is filed away somewhere in his young mind.  I wonder if he remembers the awesome thunderstorms that would roll through on those early summer nights.  Since he slept through most of them, I’m thinking probably not.  But the fireflies…  It was right around this time a year ago.  I looked out the kitchen door and saw them rise out of the grass.  Having spent the last eight years on the West Coast, I’d forgotten how much I missed them.  Knowing that I would be leaving soon, I made it a goal to bring my son into their midst.  The challenge was keeping him awake long enough.  He was groggy when I carried him outside, but he quickly took note of the dancing lights around him.  He stood on the deck watching, and whispering an occasional “wow”.  I set out to catch one in my hand and bring it to him.    This was an easy thing to do about forty years ago.  My up-close eyesight has since gone the way of my distance vision, and I swear those dang bugs somehow got faster in the ensuing decades.  It took awhile, but I finally got one and brought it to him.  “Look, G,” I brought my cupped hands to his face and opened them.  The little light flashed as the firefly opened his wings and flew up into the night.  The light traced his path, a rough spiral that joined his brothers to form a greater constellation.  “Fireflies”, I said to my son.  “Why-whys”, he replied dreamily.    I picked him up to carry him back into the house, and he was instantly asleep.