In my childhood, I knew ants and grasshoppers, ladybugs and crickets, cicadas and walking sticks. bumblebees, and mantises—but fireflies? For me, lightning bugs were only read about in books. I don’t remember seeing them at all. Of course, I was the only girl in the classroom who didn’t speak of watching the evening movie on television. (How could I admit I was sound asleep after Truth or Consequences?)
These days, I’m gazing at the brightness of my computer screen, sometimes until the birds’ dawn chorus. I’ve always maintained morning should begin at ten o’clock. Tonight, though, late in my adulthood, I dimmed that screen, turned off the lamps, and faced away from the shining beneath my apartment’s hallway door.
Red, amber, and white, vehicle lights flashed through gaps in the trees from the busy road across the yard. False beetles they, too quick, too regimented in their horizontal path.
I waited, forced my focus elsewhere, and the fireflies rose. Blinking from the grass and shrubs, upward into locust tree’s leaves. Here two, yellow-green, there another, white. When daylight comes, I’ll be sixty-two; I have seen the fireflies.
Krystine Kercher
Krystine Kercher
Jan Verhoeff