fireflies

I had never seen a firefly until I was about thirty years-old. I was in Tennessee to attend the wedding of my brother-in-law and we were having a barbecue in the backyard of a fine Southern home that overlooked a lake. It was dusk when the dancing, magical lights appeared around us, little flickers of light that glowed briefly, disappeared, then reappeared in a delightful display of playfulness inspired by the courtship behavior of these beetle-related insects. It was like a Disney movie come to life. Sadly, more than ten years passed before I was to see them again.

My next encounter with these creatures transpired when we moved to Connecticut for Joni to attend Yale Law School. I had rented a condominium for us in the small blue-collar town of Wallingford, ideally positioned between New Haven, where Yale is located and Farmington, where my new office was based. The condominium complex bordered a golf course that was on the outskirts of the town proper. From the freeway exit, we had to traverse largely undeveloped land to get to our condo. There was a small wooded area where the road bisected a pond filled with peepers and of course, fireflies. At night, the pond area looked as though it had been strung with hundreds of tiny blinking lights. The water of the pond reflected those lights doubling the effect, creating the illusion of floating inside a small universe of animated stars.

Another amazing firefly sighting occurred as we drove to Spartanburg, So. Carolina one night. The fireflies hovered above car level on the unlit freeway. They appeared as streams of light much like the depiction of jumping into hyperspace in the Star Wars movies. Their contrails surrounded us as we sped quietly through the night.