Lightning Bug Sightings Bring Back Fond Memories

I saw my first lightning bugs last weekend. I was driving home from a friend’s house and saw all the blinking while going down Book Road through Springbrook Prairie. I was so excited.

Every summer when the little fireflies come out I become nostalgic. Just the sight of the little buggers takes me back to my childhood and then it’s like a stream of consciousness experience.

I start to remember playing tag, hide and seek or freeze tag with my friends. We would stay out until it started to get dark. Invariably, someone’s mom would start yelling out the front door around 9 p.m. We never went far, we stayed on our block.

And, just as we hid among the “nice neighbors” yards, my bike saw all of the bumps and dips along the sidewalk from one end of the street to the other.

The days were often spent at my cousins’ house where they had a pool. We would spend hours in the pool, and then have our lunch of PB & J and Cool Aid and then head back outside again.  Or, me and my cousin Patrick—who was a month younger than me— could be found in his basement playing Pong or Air Hockey.

If I wasn’t in my cousins' pool or at the public pool, my mom and I were at the Lans Theater. The old theater was the place to see movies in Lansing. Now, it’s a pizza place. I saw all the Disney movies there and of course the original Herbie, the Love Bug flicks – pre-Lindsay Lohan, luckily.

In the evening the lightning bugs would come out and I’d run around with my friends trying to catch them. Sometimes we’d put them in a container to watch them blink. Some kids liked to smoosh them for their glowing goo, but I thought that was mean.

Today I still try to catch the lightning bugs, though—and I’m no scientist—it seems to me there are not nearly as many as there once was. And, when I lived in Colorado, I learned they don’t have them there.   

My attempts at capturing the flitting, fleeting little bugs is much more difficult now. I often wonder how I was so successful as a child. Then again, my eyesight is no longer 20/20.

As I grab at the air, usually ending up with nothing cupped between my hands, my neighbors may wonder what I’m trying to do. I don’t care.

Just the sight of the bugs takes me back to a happy time, when I was young and carefree and really had no worries in the world. A time of innocense and wonder and pure possibility.

And, just as summer after summer the lightning bugs flash and flicker, the wonder of pure possibility remains.