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!)
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