The girls were here...first fireflies....

From Thursday night until Sunday morning, Josh and Cathy and our three girl granddaughters were here.

As always, it was exhilarating and  exhausting!

Bern and the girls made a Fairy Village--Bern spent three days making three 'fairy houses' painted and covered with leaves and gave the girls lots of stuff to 'create' their house and fairy's as well.

I wish I knew how to put photos on my blog because the photos of the fairy village would blow your mind! Really!

They worked for hours with shells from North Carolina and sticks to do shishka-bobs and lots of other stuff Bern came up with. Amazing what they did, trust me.

And when they weren't working on the Fairy Village, they were the smartest, funniest, most wonderful grand-daughters on the planet.

Like always.

They left for Baltimore this morning, just before I left for Killingworth and church.

And tonight there were fireflies--the first of the summer.

A dozen or so of them, out in our front lawn, amid the plants and flowers, glorious.

We called them 'lightening bugs', where I come from, but I've gotten used to the North-East term of 'fireflies'.

They always signal high summer for me.

One of the regrets of my childhood is that I used to catch them in my uncle's yard and put them into jars with holes cut in the top by my father's pocket knife. There were hundreds there in the mountains of West Virginia. And I'd let them go at the end of the night--though some friends told me they tore off the tails and made bracelets of fire--but some of them would be dead.

What a crime, what a terrorist act, what an unforgivable sin to cause the death of such a thing of wonder as a fire-fly, lightening-bug.

I repent that every time I see one, like tonight, and hope God is more gracious and merciful with me than I am with myself.

Which, I firmly, truly trust God is......

Fire flies rule and rock and make me understand how wondrous creation is.

Just like my granddaughters do.....

What a joy to be alive in the presence of lightening bugs and Morgan and Emma and Tegan.

Amen and amen.....