I’m under a large cedar tree in my backyard, surrounded by unlit tiki torches. The sky is saying goodnight with a deep, dusky sigh. The warm, yellow glow from my neighbors’ windows and porch lights compliment the cool, blue backdrop. I join my little corner of the world in a collective exhale as another day falls behind us.
My tiki torches are unlit because I am enjoying torches of another kind — by the hundreds — as lightning bugs* rise from the grass and float drunkenly to the trees. Their dances of light pop quietly around me, and I feel almost airborne, weightless.
The creek is babbling, full from recent rainfall. The bullfrogs are warming up, practicing their scales for another nocturnal symphony, and I fall back in time to 1974.
My best friend, Randy, is crouching with an open glass jar in his left hand, lid in his right, prowling with a slow, steady determination. His thin, spindly silhouette moves slowly in the muggy summer twilight. His face is rimmed in gauzy yellow light from the dozen or so lightning bugs flashing in his jar.
I’m a few steps away, gliding along with my own jar, mesmerized by these magical creatures. Our lids are rimmed with aluminum foil and punctured by pencils to let the bugs breathe. We will let them go after curious examination. I wonder how they got here, where they came from and why they emerge every summer to flash their tender, silent Morse code in a clover field alongside my favorite creek.
I am still enchanted some 50 years later. I no longer capture the bugs in a jar but let them dance freely in my yard. Alongside my little creek, with this light show going on all around me, I can pay quiet, reverent homage to a wondrous world that allows such enchanting things as lightning bugs. In this most natural of theaters, I realize how small a part I play, and I am grateful that my little flash of a life gets to be tucked in here somehow, that I can witness these everyday marvels for as many summers as I am gifted.
They’ve been here a long time, lightning bugs. Fossil records reveal a 100 million-year-old history. Ancient mythology associated lightning bugs with hope and guidance. Japanese legend says that lightning bugs are the souls of the dead. Early Native American tribes were known to smear them on their faces and chests as decoration.**
They have special organs under their abdomens to take in oxygen. They combine the oxygen with a substance called luciferin to make light. They use this, called bioluminescence, to light up the ends of their abdomen.
Lightning bugs live about 60 days. Their luminous bottoms are bitter and even toxic to predators, so they typically die of natural causes. They are nocturnal and sleep in taller grass during the day.
If you think you are seeing fewer lightning bugs than you did as a child, you’re not imagining things. No fewer than 18 species of lightning bugs are in danger of extinction in North America alone. Experts say this is due mostly to pesticides, light pollution and habitat destruction.
Summer nights remind us of new love, lazy and warm, pointing us to a simpler time, free from stress and worry. Summertime is forever linked with flowers, butterflies, cool water and tiny, mystical creatures who light up the night sky with their bottoms.
And these flashes of light are all about love, as it turns out. Lightning bugs use their flashes to find mating partners. During the warm nights of July, our backyards become a virtual nightclub for these illuminating creatures, and the night sky becomes a Tinder app, of sorts, for bugs.***
Most of the flashes we see are from male lightning bugs. They flash specific patterns to get the attention of females, who wait in the grass until they see something they like and then respond with flashes of their own.****
I imagine the females, just hanging out on a long branch, commenting on “that guy over there with the interesting flash pattern.”
“Ooooh, it’s so complicated,” another female might say, “I’ll bet he’s really interesting. I can tell just by looking at his flash pattern.”
Another female might say, “Who does that guy over there think he is, with that simple one-two, one-two flash pattern, like that’s gonna get him anywhere?”
“BOOOOORING,” they all say and giggle menacingly in that way some female lightning bugs do.
Having been that guy with an odd, irregular flash pattern, I feel for the lonely, leftover lightning bug. I saw one of these guys on my window screen as I sipped coffee last week. It was 7:30 in the morning. He had obviously been up all night. He looked tired, defeated, unfulfilled. Yet, here he was, still hopeful. Everyone else was passed out, exhausted, collapsed on leaves everywhere, but he was still awake, still searching.
Granted, he might have to step up his flash pattern game, but come on, ladies, don’t be so hard on the guy. I’m sure he has other traits that are quite beneficial in a relationship, like, maybe he can fix things, or he’s very organized. It’s not always about a flash pattern.
I began to daydream about being this lone lightning bug’s “wingman” (pun most definitely intended) as I helped him find love tonight in the backyard.
Me and Sparky (I’ll call him Sparky, for obvious reasons) are sitting at a lightning bug bar in Antioch called The Long Branch, chatting about the ladies.
“Listen, Sparky,” I say. “You’re a catch. Any gal would be lucky to have you.”
“I dunno,” moans Sparky, dejectedly. “It’s almost like I’m invisible.”
“Dude,” I say. “You are not invisible. You have the brightest butt of any bug I know.”
“Really?” says Sparky as he lights up the whole bar with his bright yellow butt.
“Yeah, man. It’s true. It’s just …”
I hesitate, not wanting to derail the positive direction of this conversation.
“You just need a better flash pattern,” I say finally.
“I’ve tried,” says Sparky, “but I have no sense of rhythm. Not like Flint over there.”
Flint is in a booth in the back corner, surrounded by beautiful babes. His butt is pulsing like a dance hall strobe light.
I slip from the barstool and make my way to the jukebox. I put in a quarter and pull up the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Sparky gives me a big smile as I walk back to my stool.
“Just feel the rhythm,” I tell him.
Sparky closes his eyes. He starts to bob his head.
“Focus,” I say. “Let the music speak to you.”
Sparky starts to light up on the two and four, adding a tidy little pick-up note before going back to the one. He’s getting it! It’s working!
Ladies start getting up from their tables to approach him, answering him with their own flickers of yellow neon.
My work here is done. I settle up with the bartender and slip out the door.
I hear the bass and drums from the jukebox and stop at the window to see Sparky surrounded by several lovely females.
“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk.”
“You go, Sparky,” I say proudly and disappear into the humid night air.
Not everyone is lucky in love. Some of us need a little help to figure it out. And let’s face it, we all need to adjust our flash patterns every now and then. Even after we find love, we should mix things up a bit, flash on the one and the three once in a while to see where it goes.
Summertime is for revisiting the magic of childhood, for pondering the complexities of what it means to be here, and during our short flash of a life, for exploring the humid, dusky mysteries of love.
Sparky and Flint are out there right now, rising up from the grass in the short time they have, to show us how it’s done.
“Stayin’ alive. Stayin’ alive. Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive.”
I love the Bee Gees.
Footnotes to make you a more interesting person.
*Do you call them fireflies? You probably do if you were raised in the Western U.S. or parts of New England. But if you were raised here in the Southeast or in the Midwest, you probably call them lightning bugs. I admit, the name “firefly” is much more poetic. I wish that’s what I called them. You might say, “Just call ‘em whatever you want, man,” but see, I can’t. I have to call them what I called them when I was a child because of the magic associated with their name. My memories of them are too precious, and I can’t change anything. “Flies that make fire” is way cooler, I get it, but I have to stick with my childhood on this.
**I knew kids who mutilated lightning bugs and smeared their cheeks as if it was glow-in-the-dark makeup or put the remains on their fingernails and pranced around like they just came from a nail salon for psychopaths. I always saw those children as barbarians. They were the same kids who burned ants with magnifying glasses and tied june bugs to sewing thread and made them fly in circles. I can only assume they grew up to be serial killers, Fortune 500 CEOs or reality TV stars.
***I like to imagine the male lightning bug’s flash to be like, “How you doin?” giving him a swagger akin to Joey from the TV sitcom, “Friends.” Next time you’re sitting on your back porch, watching the lightning bugs pop off, add your own audio commentary: “How you doin?” “How you doin?” “How you doin?” Sure, you’ll find yourself all alone on the back porch in mere minutes, but science is hard sometimes. And lonely.
****This is nothing like human rituals, where teenage boys stand along the wall while the girls dance with each other. Flash patterns notwithstanding, most humans only get together after the female takes the initiative.
