fireflies

klaralyn stopped by our little country house for an evening on her way through to new york a while back. she left about dusk and when i went out to tell her goodbye i looked out into the cornfield to the east and saw something wonderful: fireflies.

they were twinkling as far as you could see, thousands of them. the terraced cornfield looked like a green stadium with constant flashbulbs flickering at the celebrity cows across the fence. i had never before seen anything so beautiful.

after that night i tried to go outside every night at dusk in the hour after the sun set when it was dark enough to see the fireflies clearly but light enough to make out the surrounding landscape. sometimes tim and i would just stand and look, and look, and look, transfixed. it was hard to go inside. besides the cornfield stadium, our whole front yard was lit by little floating lanterns. i could have watched them for hours. it just amazes me that there are such things as fireflies. they look so magical they seem like something you would only see in a computer animated film, but there they are right in front of you. if the amount of magic in any given moment depends on how many little lightning bugs are lit in that moment, then our yard was truly an enchanted place. every second there must have been hundreds, and in the following second hundreds more. they just kept glowing.

i tried telling people they had to come out and see the fireflies while they were still in their prime, and while a few got to appreciate a pretty good show i don't think anyone but tim and i and maybe klaralyn got to appreciate the wonder at its fullest. we weren't sure if this was a regular occurrence or if they were especially plentiful this particular year, but neighboring farmers said that they hadn't seen this many before either. there are less of them now. i don't know if i will ever see as many at one time as i did this summer, but the memories will be with me for a very long time.