Catching lightning bugs (and screaming)
I only break my own heart.
My earliest summer memories smell like wild green onions and the honeysuckle we scouted everywhere we went. I can still feel the gentle tickle of thick blades of bright green grass on my ankles, the kind that stays cool to the touch and is smooth on its sides, begging to be rubbed between little kid fingers (unlike the scratchy hay-hell of today’s HOA required bermuda–yuck).
Summers growing up were spent roaming our street bare feet burning on the hot street, ditching bikes in neighbors’ grass to go wander through unfenced backyards, drinking from warm hoses.
In the late evenings, when the sun would finally drop on long adventurous days and the sky would soften from cerulean to dusk, it would finally be time for one of my favorite activities: catching lightning bugs.
My older sister and I would take to the yard. Being a bit older and more experienced, she had an easier go of things–faster, taller, longer arms for reaching further into the twilight.
My preferred way of catching them involved a kids’ plastic shovel. It was as long as my arm, doubling my reach, and the end was neon orange, which I thought attracted the fireflies. (Did it really? I have no idea.) Determined to match my sister’s numbers, I would wave the shovel through the warm night air, chasing the flashing green dots through the cool grass, warm earth padding my soft soles: ready for magic. Because what else could explain these brilliant little creatures that blazed so bright in the falling night?
This is a great time to share that I was terrified of bugs. Crawly, jotty, impossible to predict. The horror.
Six year old me: long red hair blowing around my waist as I frolicked through the twilight, neon orange shovel raised to the sky like a tiny Viking making landfall, equal parts ecstatic and determined to catch and discover the source of a magic I already knew was going to freak me the fuck out.
With delight and dread, I would watch the bright light disappear and in its place a BUG would appear. And with that same delight, I would beg the night to provide a magical lightning bug on my shovel; and with that same dread, I would clench my stomach and hope against hope that no actual bugs would land on my shovel.
Inevitably, I would catch one. Or, more accurately stated, one would land on my shovel tip, through no real skill on my part. And as soon as the tiny crawly thing’s presence was clear, my body would seize up. I would scream. I would cry. Run to my mom and beg her to get it off. Perhaps throw my shovel on the ground and run away. (Sister laughing, of course.) Because while it was exactly what everyone knew and expected to happen, it was so very not what I could handle, what I actually wanted.
Bless my family, because they removed the lightning bugs from my shovel as I cried. And then they watched as I picked up the bug-free shovel and once again set off into the dark yard to do it again. To try to both catch and not catch lightning bugs. To be shocked and devastated when one landed on my shovel. To cry and freak out and then do it again. Stubbornly attached to some romantic notion rather than understanding the certain outcome, the actual reality of the situation.1
As an adult, I look forward to the lightning bugs making their summer appearance. I find myself gazing out dark windows come May, waiting to see the little bursts of neon light against the trees. The day I finally see one is my first day of summer.
I have finally accepted that they are bugs, that if I caught one I would be holding both something magical and an actual bug. That both of those things are true.
But, as an adult, I am only finding more ways that my stubborn insistence on romanticized notions cloud my ability to grasp the reality before me. My well-meaning determination to find magic and meaning often comes at the expense of understanding the actual patterns playing out in my life, to my own shock and detriment. The heavy expectation my ideals place on situations often only lead to my own devastation.
I only break my own heart.
(While the people that care about me watch… knowing the end.)
I could get specific. I could outline the adult versions of these scenarios, ad nauseam. But we all know these situations pretty quickly–the health stuff, the relationships, the family things. The adult versions lack the clarifying hindsight and the narrative simplicity. And as we grow up, the situations we struggle with morph from charming to complex, entangling other people. The wounds stay open longer, come apart again easier. And, honestly, tiny Meri is so much more compelling, sympathetic (and adorable).
Somewhere along the way though, I can soften. Allow the space for both. Or all to be true.
I want to find the magic, to delight in it.
In fact: I choose it. It’s not weakness or naïveté. It is stubbornness, intentional.
But it cannot be done by ignoring reality. Because that is always done at my own expense, my own hurt.
And sometimes reality is magic, too. Sometimes it’s more magical. More meaningful.
The fact that lightning bugs are actual bugs is absolutely magic2. It may not be my preferred brand of bug-free magic, but how fucking incredible is it that there are tiny bugs that dance in the dark, flashing tiny beacons against the summer night. The fact that something I find so utterly mesmerizing also comes from something I find so icky (ugh) makes it all the more impactful. It gives it a meaning. A layer more than a romantic notion.
It’s real and it’s magic.
That’s the sweet spot: the acceptance of the real and its inherent magic.
It’s both. Both. Both.
Let me go find my shovel.
this corresponds to a yogic principle that i will come back to ;)
before anyone rolls their eyes and thinks of informing me of the science behind bioluminescence. i maintain that even scientifically explained phenomenon can be pure magic. it’s not either/or. it’s BOTH.
This is so exquisite and deeply relatable, Meri. A read that is both beauty and medicine.