The senses and summers past. What did summer feel like twenty years ago? We had chickens. The pasture was rebounding from the droughts of the year before. And every evening, for a couple of weeks, the fireflies lifted silently, ghostly, to wink and woo.
The two bits of writing below (circa 2005) share a place, a few weeks apart. I am there, hearing the night noises of July. I cross the creek, drawing in the cool thin fog, pooled in that memory, there, along the pasture by the barn. At dusk. Listen…
Summer Lightning
It is late, and I am last to bed, past the usual time. I step out onto the front porch into the cool, sweet air of early June, and sit on the top step quietly as if not to disturb the wildlife, whose nocturnal day I am entering.
The pasture grasses just beyond the maples are in full flower and their pollen smells like midnight bread baking, while Goose Creek sends up wafts of spearmint, wet mud and turbulence.
My eyes soon learn to see in darkness and I am aware of soundless flashes of summer lightning, and stars overhead. My night vision comes and goes with each flash; and pause; and flash. Rising from the dark field on the fragrance of grasses are tens of thousands of lightning bugs.
Put them in a jar, shake and see them illumined with the cold translucence of memory. They pulse and rise above the field in counterpoint to the tempo of the clouds, signaling ancient syllables that we could understand, if we were more often still, less hurried, and more at home in our own pastures.
Gravity pulls me down and I lie on my back, on cool stone horizontal, before a mock-infinity of space, wondering what is my place in this world of men and of words? Do I deserve to be so blessed among Earth’s teeming humanity?
What must I do in the warmth of this gentle epiphany that is revealed to me tonight and how should I then live?
Maybe I will try to find the words in the morning, after the house is quiet again and the fireflies have gone to bed and the world smells of heat and ozone and toast.
Ascension of Souls
I neglected to shut the chickens in the coop until almost dark on a warm and fragrant summer night. I stand there alone at the edge of our pasture, deep in the fold between steep ridges on the eastern flank of Floyd County.
The whites of fleabane, chrysanthemum and Queen Anne’s lace glow faintly among the bowing heads and angled stems of orchard grass and foxtail. This crepuscular landscape at this uncommon hour is spattered with the palest pastels of wild pink and golden aster. A faint radiance washes the fading field in sky-glow bouncing off heaven from somewhere beyond the curve of earth.
The detached observer that night would only have noted that the fire flies here are synchronized in the beginning of their day.
I was that objective observer—at first—as must come at the beginning when we encounter art new to us. We evaluate the physical qualities of a painting before moving in ways we do not understand to the higher awareness of message and meaning.
And when that moment of comprehension finally reaches our mind and heart, when we grasp the full impact of the creation before us, we know the AH of appreciation, the AHA of genius discovered, and finally, the complex mix of emotion that may leave us smiling through tears.
Some combination of light and heat signals to them that it is time, and the fireflies respond, waking and setting about to mate. They rise one by one through a brief reveille for a long night of love.
Few and scattered at first, across the length and breadth of the field they rise, not yet to the tops of the tallest grasses—every one uniformly lofted in a perfect vertical line of light, lanterns briefly tracing a thin, rising brush stroke of yellow-green. Then they pause and go dark—each insect having pulsed a single on-duty wink as their day begins, before rising into the forest canopy.
I stand transfixed, a mortal blessed to witness this ascension of souls, an otherworldly choreography of light by naive performers hardwired to follow an ancient script they do not know, a performance for my sake alone. And I am smitten, speechless and smile through tears.
In their ultimate hundreds, the full multitude of them awakes, the souls of all those who have gone before us here. Their cold lights lift and will preside over this peaceful place in silence for yet another summer’s night while I sleep—as they have over all the nights I have slept for a decade of summers here, not knowing of this brief movement in the ballet of beetle-spirits just beyond my window.
There’s comfort knowing I’ll never not know this again.
– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE.