BooMan’s story about where you live got me thinking about lightning bugs. I moved around a lot when I was growing up and lightning bugs were a part of the landscape in a number of the places I lived. Especially Pittsburgh, where my grandparents lived.
Now, we don’t have lightning bugs in Seattle. We have sphinx moths and spiders and hornets and honeybees, but no lightning bugs. So my daughter, growing up in Seattle, had to experience lightning bugs through my memories. I told her about sitting on the back porch of my grandpa’s house, listening to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ game on the radio, waiting until the light deepened just enough for that first spark of light back in the deep of the tomato patch. Of how I’d get my gramma to give me a mason jar, and how my grandpa would carefully punch holes in its lid and how I’d stuff it with fresh grass. And then, how I’d trace the bugs’ paths through the garden and catch them and carefully open the jar and slip them in, one at a time, until the jar was full. And then go quietly onto the stairwell leading up to the second floor of the house and pull closed the curtain that in the winter held the heat downstairs until it was time for bed. And in the dark of the stairwell, shake the jar so the bugs glowed, ferociously. And how I could, if I held the jar right next to the book I was reading, read by the light of the fireflies.
When my daughter was 16 she did the obligatory coming of age road trip. She and two friends piled into a 15 year old Oldsmobile and took off, south along the coast to San Francisco then east to through Nevada to the southwest and on to Texas.
She called from east Texas.
“Mom! I see them!”
Them? Huh?
“Lightning bugs! I see them. They’re all over.”
And then the confession:
“Mom, I just played along with you when you told me about lightning bugs. Bugs that light up. Yeah… Right… Sure… Mom.”
I love it here in Seattle, but I miss the lightning bugs.
What did you see this weekend?
