Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Well, I guess summer really has arrived. Fireflies have come out again.

It's funny - they're something I always sort of "forget" about over the winter, and then when I first see them in the summer, I am all "OH! Fireflies!" almost like the first time I ever saw them.

(Apparently some parts of the country don't have them; one of my friends, who is a grandmother, said her grandkids who lived in...I think it was Arizona? In the desert? had never seen fireflies until they came here to visit her).

Fireflies are one of the things that make me think of summers when I was a kid - going out to catch them (though you quickly learn that keeping them is kind of tragic - they die overnight, even in a jar with holes poked in the lid - so after a few times of that you learn to just catch them temporarily and then let them go before going in for the night). They were one of those things that was just "there" in the summer - like Library Book Club and Silver Springs (a local lake/beach where people would go to swim) and the smell of cut grass and food being cooked out.

3 comments:

Mom on Health Patrol said...

Here, the sound of crickets remind me that it's summer.

-- Grace in MA

Chris Laning said...

Nope, no fireflies in California. :(

I think the last time I saw some was in the Midwest, where I was at a summer conference. It had been years since I'd seen them and I'd forgotten how amazing they are.

Big Alice said...

Yes, none of the places I've lived in the West have fireflies. I think it's an East-of-the-Rockies bug (like chiggers, so I at least we get good and bad). I never saw fireflies until we did a cross-country roadtrip when I was 11 or so.