We walked quietly through the dark, over moss and freshly-mown grass, beneath low limbs that cast shadows, still, in the glow of the moon. We traipsed through neighbors’ yards, over culverts, below hillsides, careful among landscaping that wasn’t ours.
“There!” my little girl said with excitement, darting a few steps farther away.
She’d brought a glass jar and had me carry it. I managed the lid as she caught fireflies, grabbing each one and tucking it in with a happy little shriek and squeal.
“Why do crickets chirp at night?” she asked.
“That’s how they communicate,” I told her.
“They sure do have a lot to say,” she said.
During firefly season, well past sunset, we have a few minutes every evening when it’s late enough for the flies to luminesce but still light enough for their pursuers to see them after they dim. Beyond that, they have to be grabbed while still glowing, a much smaller window for success.
“Why don’t cats live as long as people?” she asked, and I did my best to explain how different animals’ lives have their own spans of time.
We rounded a turn and started uphill. It was darker now. The last of the sunlight was gone and clouds covered the moon. Each new catch required a longer chase, moving quickly to where the last spark appeared, hands ready to grab, stepping smartly once, then again, until the specimen was gathered or gone. She caught another and brought it to me.
“How do people know what they’re supposed to do every day?” she asked. “After they’re all grown up, I mean?”
This one took more answering and, by the time I’d muddled through, she was closing in on another bug.
I waited beneath a street lamp as she walked away. Among thick cedars that understoried tall pine, she was gone into darkness that was complete. A spark. A shuffle. Another spark, this one much higher in the trees.
“Why don’t grown ups catch lightning bugs?” she asked. “Why don’t you?”
“Well, I like watching you catch them,” I said. “At some point, you’ve caught enough yourself, but you can still enjoy the chase by watching your kids do the catching.”
As we walked home in the darkness she was only an outline, a tracing of someone who was or who might be.
“Besides,” I said, “who would carry the jar?”
“I think I want to let them go,” she said. “You can turn them loose.”
“Good idea,” I said, removing the lid and shaking them out. One or two sparked and glowed as they went. I held the empty jar up to the sky to make sure no stragglers remained.
“It’s magic, when we catch them,” she said as we crossed our own lawn. “Maybe we grow out of it when we’re through being a kid, and then we find it again when we’re grown. Maybe it takes having lost it to see how much we loved it after all.”
I stood stunned in the darkness.
“Hang onto that jar, please,” she called back. “I’ll probably need it again someday.”
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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