July as Memory Light

​I called them lightning bugs, not fireflies. Fireflies does sound prettier now, more fairy like, more like something that belongs in a poem or on the cover of a glorious July journal. However, when I was a little girl, they were simply called lightning bugs; there seems to be a little bit of a difference.

On summer nights I sometimes caught them and put them in a jar. My mother would watch me while I ran over the yard, trying my best to capture the little winged messengers. Sometimes we counted the lightning bugs when the night was through. Sometimes we even wrote the number down on the calendar, as if I had accomplished something official and grand. But at the end of the night, Mama always told me to open the jar and let them go. 

I did not really want to. I really wanted to keep the little lightning bugs. I wanted to put some grass or leaves or something down in the jar to make them a little home. However, my mother said no. They needed to go free.

So, if the fireflies did not hurry out, I would sometimes shake the jar a little too hard, trying to help them along. This letting go was not my favorite part of the process. Then Mama would say, “No, no don’t shake them. They’ll crawl out. The ones that stay must not be afraid. They may kind of like you, but they will still want to go free before morning.” Looking at that statement, I think she was talking about the bugs. Maybe she was talking about men.

I know now my mom probably just did not want dead bugs in the bottom of a jar. She was practical in that way. But she was also quiet about some tender things, and maybe that was one of them. Maybe she knew something I did not know yet: that loving a thing and keeping a thing are not always the same.

I had another way of seeing lightning bugs, too. My mom and grandmothers had soft, nylon scarves that women used to wear, and if a person put one over their eyes, every light in the world turned into a puff ball of diffused light. Car tail lights became red glowing moons. Porch lights bloomed. And lightning bugs became pure magic – little, floating lanterns in the dark.

I love seeing fireflies along roadsides and fields, woods, anywhere the night was dark enough for them to show themselves. One time, at a friend’s farm when our children were little, her whole place seem full of them. Her land must’ve been perfect for lightning bugs that night, and I remember it was one of those small miracles childhood gives us without announcing itself. Our children were ecstatic. 

However, there is one lightning bug memory I wish I did not have. One night when I was about eight or nine years old, at my grandparents’ house, some of my dad‘s distant relatives came by. In the group there were grown-ups laughing inside and outside, men sitting with my dad and both my grandfathers in the yard, women talking in the kitchen… The kind of evening that probably looked perfectly ordinary to everyone else. 

Children were everywhere that I really did not know. I guess we decided we could catch lightning bugs. My grandma had plenty of jars and old lids, so there was no shortage of anything… Except maybe kindness.

Toward the end of the night, those “awful” children showed me something I had never seen before. Suddenly they began to squish the lightning bugs so that the glowing part of that bug left a glowing smear on their skin. They made rings and bracelets and earrings on their skin with those squished, dead bugs. I think each of us had about ten fireflies apiece, so they had quite a bit to work with. They started to write their names on the sidewalk with that little,  stolen light.

But not me.

As a child I was not exactly quiet. I like to be quiet, but throughout my life things just didn’t always work out that way. So, as I watched this debacle, I heard myself scream over and over. I kicked these mysterious cousins.I threw their jars. Oddly, they just laughed at me. I remember my dad coming — stomping over, and so did the other fathers because to them I know I would have looked like the problem. I never thought my dad really understood what had happened or why it had mattered so much to his little girl. Maybe to him it was just bugs— and children being children. Maybe he wanted his daughter to look a little more civilized. All I remember is that after that, Daddy marched me up the stairs and took me quietly inside to my mother to deal with.

But to me it was a terrible thing. It still turns my stomach a little all these years later. Maybe some stories do not need a moral. Maybe some things just happened, and we carry them. But I think that night did teach me something about wonder. Some people see a little light and want to follow it. Some people see a light and want to keep it. And some “awful” people see a light and want to smear it on the sidewalk just to prove they can.

I still love lightning bugs, and I still don’t love that third kind of person. I still think the best thing to do with a firefly is to count it, admire its little light, and let it live openly… in a jar or not. Sometimes they like you, but they still will want to go free by morning. (Yes, I’m still talking about Lightning bugs!)

When the wind comes up

We have had a lot of storms lately. 

 I never like to write about storms because some people have suffered terrible losses in them. A storm can be a new story to one person and the worst day of someone else's life. I have a sweet friend who lost her home in a tornado years ago, and the stories she told we're almost unbelievable – curtains and things from cabinets set carefully down in the grass or out in the trees, while other parts of life were torn apart completely. 

 Every part of the country seems to have its own kind of danger. Some people live with hurricanes. Some live with wildfires or earthquakes. Here in the Midwest, we live with tornado season, straight – line winds, and those black skies that make us wonder, is this the one?

 When I was a little girl, my dad was the brave one in the weather. My mother and I were more likely to be inside listening to the radio and worrying, while daddy was outside watching the sky. He would be squinting into the rain and grinning. He adored weather in a way I don't think he would've admitted. A storm put a little lift in his step.

 One June evening – June 28, I remember – we were trying to beat a storm and get the hay in. Daddy had taken his vacation, not to rest, but to do the haying. My dad cut and raked his own hay; then he usually hired it bailed into small round bales. I sometimes helped just a little bit at night by driving the old '47 pick up in granny low gear while he walked beside it , tossing bales into the truck. I loved doing that. My dad would stride along in the heat with hay hooks in his hands, looking almost like some young Titan moving through the field. I felt like I was part of a team that could not be squelched. We didn't do very many loads a night, but it was the highlight of my day. That summer, my mother had told him during his vacation she wanted the outhouse taken down— not a tidy little chore. There was more to it than knocking down that building. There was also the hole to deal with, and daddy had spent too many days looking forward to hay hauling to get that job done for mother. He was not eager to give up his haying time for anything else. This storm, even my daddy came into the basement with us. We had those little, high basement windows that are hard to see out of, so daddy got a wood crate and stood on it in order to look out the window. All at once he laughed so loud and then just kept saying, "I've got a surprise! you're gonna get a surprise! we've got a surprise coming." Mom and I tried to guess, but we were wrong every time. When the storm passed and we came up from the basement, my mom saw it. That wind had taken the old outhouse clear away. Well, after that, the night before Mom's birthday, Daddy had to finish the job the storm had started

Storms were not my mother's finest hour. She was one of the most giving women I ever knew – hard-working, sacrificial, and good to people. But storms, mice, and snakes brought out what I can only call her little yellow tail. 

 When I was about seven, a dead mouse rolled out of a rug in the dining room, and the next thing I knew I had been shoved aside while mother got herself safe. She went clear into another room. Mom came back sheepishly, apologizing, but by then I was pretty ticked... For the rest of our lives that was a family joke: some mother pushing her child out of the way to escape a dead mouse. Years later when mother was in her 90's and on a walker, she called me to come up from my bedroom after I had moved in with her. She wanted me to kill something in her bathroom. I asked if it was a mouse. She told me it probably was a mouse. At that time I immediately decided it would be fun just to go get in the car and drive away. However, I had seen my dad working too many years on doing just exactly what my mother asked. There was no way that I was not going to take care of whatever request that was. Mom knew good and well it was not a mouse. It was a black snake. By the time I got up there with my grandmother’s sturdy old cane, my mom was coming through the living room at a speed nobody knew she still had in her. She had the walker up under her armpits and was running with it, screaming, "Gayla! it's a snake! it's a snake! oh my Lord, it's a snake!" I knew what my mom expected me to do. I knew what my dad would've wanted me to do. I took my grandmother's cane, and I went into that bathroom I pulled that snake out of the register where he was trying to get away, and and I beat the daylights out of him. Now, that was a different kind of storm, but it had about the same amount of screaming 

Another stormy night after I had moved in with Mom, we decided she might need to get into the closet for shelter. Translation: mom decided she wanted to get in the closet. Now, our closets were full of everything, of course, but mom was little. She managed to wiggle herself in the closet under a shelf, and she sat down on a box of my son's toys. Well, that box gave away. I heard a little whoop, I looked in, and my mom's head was sticking up, her bottom was down in the box, and her legs were straight out. We had a terrible time getting her out because we were both laughing so hard. She did not want me to call my son to get her out of that box because she did not want anybody to laugh at her. Naturally, I told everybody. Naturally, everybody laughed.

 That same storm took out a lot of trees. Some came from the front yard and went over the house and landed in the backyard, tearing up the roof as they went. When the insurance adjuster came, he said he didn't think we could count those trees and that roof unless the trees had stayed on the roof. My cousin's husband didn't miss a beat. He reached down toward the tree limbs and said, "OK I can fix that." So... we did get help with that roof. 

 That is how storms are, I guess. They are frightening and serious, and sometimes they leave real damage behind. They remind us how small we are and how little control we have. But after they pass, if we are fortunate, we also find a few stories to tell. The outhouse gone. My mother and the toy box. That walker with my mother making record time through the living room. My cousin quick to throw the trees right back on the roof if that's what it took. I also remember one hot, stormy night when my dad took the lava soap outside somewhere in the dark and took a shower in the rain. I always wanted to do that, but I don't think that's gonna happen in this lifetime. 

 But I kind of like Weather, too. I remember my father standing on that crate, looking out the basement window, brave and intensely curious. Alive to the weather. I remember my mother laughing when she saw that old outhouse gone. I remember the hay stacked just in time, the pickup crawling through the field, and the feeling that we had outfoxed the storm for one more night. Maybe that is part of living in storm country. We respect the danger. We grieve with people who lose too much. We watch the sky. We listen for warnings. And when the wind finally passes, we step outside and count what is still standing.

Do you have a storm story you remember – a rainy night, a blustery day, or one of those strange little moments that happened because the wind came up?