Nora Graves
The language of fireflies is light.
I should like to learn it.
I have yet to see a firefly in Florida, and I’ve lived here for over twenty years. I’m told we are home to 50 different species, more than any other state. As of posting, none of my native Floridian students have confessed to seeing one or even knowing what they are.
Floridians don’t see fireflies because high pesticide use and light pollution inhibit mating. I sympathize. Sometimes I feel living here is putting out my light, too.
They are otherworldly little creatures. After hatching from the eggs, the larva live underground for one or two years and form pupae like butterflies. On emerging from the pupae, the adults live a gloriously brilliant but brief two weeks. I wonder if they feed on light like astrophage?
Find out more about fireflies here.
Whippoorwills are creatures of the night, too. They breed in rhythm with the moon’s light and lay their eggs exactly ten days before it is full.
Traditionally considered harbingers of death, the first whippoorwill of spring, however, is a source of good luck. Young girls counted how many times it said its name to determine the number of years until their marriages.
To find out more about the connection between whippoorwills and the human soul (including their spell over H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King), visit Jared Del Rosso’s website, The Lonesome Whippoorwill.
Just an Iowa farm girl
out chasing fireflies
I grew up on crisp winter nights when you chored in the dark and crunched home on snow under a canopy of stars, contemplating eternity. We went to bed in early spring with windows flung open to the sky, stirred by the scent of life in the night air. The hollow, mournful calls of whippoorwills tugged at our souls.
In summer, the fireflies came out. We chased after them, barefoot in the grass, hoarding them in mason jars with holes punched in the lids. They kept us company as we slipped into unconsciousness, jars set on our windowsills, their flickering lamps lighting our darkness.
These memories pale, however, beside the experience of those rare seasons when the right weather patterns coincided with the insect’s lifecycle to release a plague of fireflies over our fields. A plague of fireflies is a very different thing from a plague of locusts or grasshoppers. It clothes our darkness in light. The landscape does not glow with the steady radiance of the moon or an aura. It is layered over by a living sea of billions upon trillions of tiny twinkling stars.
Such a moment cannot be described; it must be lived. It lifts the limits of our eyesight, and we see briefly, but with shattering clarity and certainty, that something deep and alive and essential to our well-being dwells beneath the surfaces of this world.
I treasure the night’s revelations. My soul is the jar I store them in. They have become for me a trysting place where eternity and time, light and darkness meet and touch and make their peace.
