lightening bugs

I saw lightening bugs tonight in our back yard. You might call them fireflies, but you know what they are. I see them rarely in Connecticut but when I was a child in West Virginia, they were as thick as a plague. They were everywhere.

When I was a child we would catch them in my Uncle Russel's front yard by the mayonnaise jar full. I regret to tell you that we would tear off their tails and make bracelets on our sweaty wrists and the girls would make necklaces of firefly tails in the moisture around their necks.

And did we ever let them out of the jars before we fell, exhausted and damp into our beds?

What I don't remember is how we scraped the tails off our skin after the glow finally left....Probably I don't want to know that.

I was in a restaurant in Washington, DC about a year ago. It was the night of the terrible train wreck that injured a lot of people. The restaurant was only on stop from where the accident happened. Buses were lining up to take people around the wreck area so they could get home. It was terrible. Everyone eating knew about it and we were all horrified.

When we came outside, across the street from the restaurant there was a little patch of grass, filled with lightening bugs. They blinked and blinked and we all stood in silence watching the wonder of that display.

Then life interfered. We had to go where we were sleeping. We had all had too much wine and, I remember distinctly, I had chicken livers...something you don't find too much...to eat.

And people were on there way to hospitals and some of them would die and two wars were raging and the economy was in the toilet and the world as we know it was about to implode.

But there was this: those lightening bugs took our minds away from all that for a long moment and we simply watched them flicker in the night.