Saw my brilliant friend Renee, a gifted artist and the world's best cook, tonight. Renee walks her dogs every day in Congressional Cemetery. Tonight, she told me that she's seen fireflies this week. So, of course, I came directly home and went out onto my back deck to see if they'd returned to Arlington, yet. And, there, blinking in and out of the branches of the oak trees, against an indigo-black sky, were the first, few, brave fireflies.
On my wheel of the year, the fireflies are very important. Just after I bought this house, after years and years of living in high-rise apartments, some medication I was taking for breast cancer threw me into a horrible depression. Never having suffered anything remotely like that in my entire life, it took me a long time to realize what was going on and what was causing it. So my first summer here was a time of confusion and saddness for me -- except for the fireflies. I still remember the night that I wandered out onto the screen porch in back and saw hundreds of fireflies, blinking in and out of all the trees, across the yard, up against the screen. How could anyone look at something like that and feel anything except happy?
And, so, every year since then, I watch for them and mark their coming. I tell everyone when they're back and beg them to come over to my porch, sit in the dark with me, and watch the beauty.
Here we are. As Blog o'Gnosis points out, the Summer Solstice, midsummer, is only a few days away. And, the dragonflies are back. Sometimes, it's the small, personal rituals that we use to mark the turning of the wheel that mean the most, that help us to truly thrive.
5 comments:
My mom lives out in the country.
Some years ago she had friends from N. California visit.
They had never seen fireflies. They ran about trying to catch them and "ooing" and "aawing".
It made me smile.
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Yes, I look for the fireflies, too. The first summer here I saw the first fireflies of the year on my father's birthday (today: 16 June). I am also from California and the only "fireflies" I'd ever seen were at Disneyland on the Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, I live up the street from a wildlife sanctuary where there is a big field that hosts thousands of fireflies every year. And every year, I bring as many people as I can out for a look at their magic.
The return of Hummingbirds....that's one of the things that I look forward to.
Thank you for remind me.
On the 4th of July weekend, a bunch of us went "camping" a bit east of Rochester NY. One night outside a very warm bar, I saw a line of evergreen trees lit up with fireflies as if they were Xmas trees.
Heh. That picture is from Hayao Miyazaki's "Grave of the Fireflies", a brilliant, haunting, very sad story of two children struggling to survive in WWII-era Japan.
How interesting that you use an illustration that to me represents a moment of happiness in a time of endless sorrow to detail your story.
Perhaps that picture is more appropriate to our times than you intended.
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