Lightning Bugs

A freeze frame of a rather blurry video I took tonight capturing about 15 fireflies as they flashed simultaneously in my front yard.
Living in the countryside, surrounded by more pasture and woods than houses, more cattle and chickens than people, each month of its own holds a natural spectacle that I look forward to and by which mark the passage of time.  In April, it is the brief, fragrant blooming of the Sweet Shrub, for example.  I associate June with Fireflies.  

Come around sundown, especially in recent days, I venture to my front porch which has a clear view to the west.  I watch the orange glow of the setting sun, sometimes reflected and expanded by clouds, sometimes just giving way to a big, darkening blue sky.  I love the feeling of this expansive space.  I have enjoyed thousands of marvelous sunsets from this very spot.  Many times, I have witnessed heat lightning over Alabama, some 30 miles away, on nights when storms approach from there.


My front yard measures close to an acre.  Far from my porch and taking up part of my western view is a large privet hedgerow that I basically allowed to grow there since 1993.  The hedge was small and sporadic when my house was built.  It could have been easily chainsawed away over a few days of manual labor.  Now it would take a bulldozer to handle it, though if that be the case the clearing would consume less than a day.  Progress, I guess.


As it is today the hedgerow is too thick to see through, so it hides the vehicles that randomly, mostly singularly, run up and down my road.  The birds love the large shrub canopy and make a big fuss sometimes as they flit about inside a hedge world whereas just outside, several hundred feet away through an open field, there is me sitting on my porch, looking over the hedgerow to a short ridge about 40 acres away.  There is only a large barn (mostly hidden by the hedgerow), a bunch of cattle, and a few horses between me and the tree line on the horizon.


You will see them as the sun starts to set beyond the ridge.  My large open front yard is filled with many hundreds of fireflies all in my mowed grass.  As the direct light of the sun vanishes, on cue, they begin to take flight from the ground and rise slowly.  Not all of them at once, but a few, just here and there to start with.  It isn’t that dark yet so you might not even notice them if you aren’t looking for them.


Then, as the light truly starts of fade and the world bathed in the hues of creeping darkness, more of them ascend at more frequent intervals so that the yard becomes a multileveled attraction of dozens and dozens of fireflies firing off randomly, alternately singular and in scattered groupings.  Occasionally masses of them will sync-up, firing at once like a trail of sparklers.


Fireworks, less obtrusive yet no less wondrous than those that people shoot on the Fourth of July, suddenly seem everywhere over my lawn.  Silently but brightly flickering, the insects fly upward, inch by inch, not in the least hurried by the coming of the evening sky.  Sometimes they will come to the shrubbery around the porch and hover there, flashing every few seconds.  I can stand up and walk up to them.  They do not recognize me.  They simply continue slowly upward, their haphazard brightness inches from my face.


By now the whole space above my yard is filled with fireflies gloriously firing in random patterns.  Even after a tough day I can come out here in June and observe them, sort of basking in them.  It never ceases to impress me and make me feel better.  They are like champagne that way, or a fresh shower. But soon the firing dissipates.  The first are the highest and stop altogether, the rest slow down and, as the swarm filters out into my woods and the land around me, they merely flash now and then; their dispersal is not the spectacle of their rising.


When I was a kid, and sometimes today, I called them “Lightning Bugs.”  I would chase them barefoot in the twilight of my parent’s farm.  At first I just caught them and watched the crawl around my open hand, waiting for the bug to flash on my skin and then flash again as it lifting from my hand, away.  When I was a pre-teen I would catch them with my cousins whenever they visited and, giggling, we’d put them in glass jars.  It was cool to watch a few dozen of them continue to flash in my bedroom as I was falling asleep.  We made sure to put aluminum foil over the jar lids and puncture little holes in it for ventilation.  I knew if I closed them up in a jar they would die.  Most of them would live until morning when I would set them free. 


Then, of course, there were the crueler times when I’d catch them and crush them in my grasp, pressing with the tip of my thumb.  When you squash a lightning bug it will often die continuously glowing, bright but not flashing at all.  This fades, of course, with the decay of whatever it is that makes these bugs work.  I don’t regret killing any of the many lightning bugs when I was a child.  I was a kid, they were merely entertainment for me.  


Summer backpacking and camping trips often include fireflies.  The most I’ve ever seen was one year at Swan Cabin, though I no longer recall exactly when.  I remember standing on the edge of the tall grassy, shrubby meadow beside the old cabin we only used to store our stuff, everyone camped in tents all around.  There were multitudes of the bugs, far more than what I have in my front yard, putting off a vibrant display that pulsed at times.  It was a remarkable moment, my best memory from that North Carolina mountain retreat.   


What a pity so many human beings, whether by living in the city or by being transfixed by their phones, never behold the wonder of the rising fireflies in twilight.  I am grateful that I do.  It is part of experiencing a space for so long it becomes a place.  A place where things change slowly, if at all.  A place where Junes are populated by thousands of distinct bugs. Then there are fireworks for free every sunset and sometimes it seems that I have it all to myself.  I accept my lifetime of lightning bugs and marvel at them still, as if I am that kid, laughing and chasing them with my cousins barefoot in the early evening.

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