As published in audio on Litro Lab Podcasts

When we were kids, my brother and I waited for the sun to set, for the light to fade, so the little bright creatures could be seen. Our back yard was filled with lightning bugs around the big old tree. I dreamed of making a treehouse in it and climbed as high as I could until it’s branches were too close together. That yard, the trees and the river around our home held all the magic in my life.  I often hid behind the bushes or under the droopy trees to pretend I was a knight, or a princess, or a sorceress. I made traps for leprechauns on St. Patrick’s day and sang a song my grandmother taught me to entice them. “Follow ma lee, Follow ma lee, Follow ma lee alluge la.” I steeled myself against many-a-dares on the banks of streams and muddy lakes. “I dare you to swim to that island!” “I dare you to grab that crab!” “I dare you to jump off that rickety bridge into the river!” Seems children trade status in dares and nature was more than willing to offer the obstacle to overcome. We loved nature without even knowing it and grew up with it beckoning. We knew all the paths to the river and where it led and all the places too muddy to pass. Our back yard led to the river if you went deep enough into the woods. At the end of our street you could launch a raft and float all the way to the ice cream store in town. If you were brave enough.

My brother and I wouldn’t kill the lightning bugs. We would of course poke small holes in the top we put on the mason jars, which was saran wrap around the lip with a rubber band. My brother was older and I begged him not to squash them to see if the juices would glow. One time he made me watch while he cut a worm into 5 pieces to unsuccessfully prove what he said he learned in school about worms having 5 hearts. I remember finding him burning ants with a magnifying glass as little boys do. I’ve since had a true empathy for bugs, they often have little lives in my mind. Families, little layers where they sit to have meals. Even dreams. But mostly, what strikes me is when they are displaced. Taken. Kidnapped and moved to an unfamiliar place.

They all escaped or we ended up letting them go, but we had to capture them. Run through the yard scooping them up between our palms and peaking in between to be sure we got one and snapping our palms shut again when we were sure. Running to the jar and somehow gently enough scraping them in as they crawled in every other direction. Maneuvering the cellophane over the top again, being sure not to let any others out. I imagine they were confused by the sudden change in their circumstance. Life must have stopped making sense. Familiarity lost. Glass was clear like air but not air, and it stopped them in their tracks without making any appearance. Suddenly sequestered and stared at, their fate unknown. 

I put the jar of lightning bugs next to my bed when I was a kid so they could light up my dreams I suppose. Because their butts glowed in the dark, like the dark itself, like the river. Like my plans to build a raft and float to the ice cream store by the bridge. Like the stories that I lived under the trees and the treehouse that I imagined would be the size of a grown up house I would build one day. 

I always think about the journey away from knowing. Today, in my apartment at 40 years old, I worry every second before I let a stink bug out the window, thinking how quickly can I do this so their fear and uncertainty about where this is leading is relieved. I’m not going to kill you bug, I think, as if they can hear. I hate that they are afraid and unknowing even if in just an instinctual way. And I aim to reassure them with the speed of my operations. I surround them with soft paper from some tree in the Amazon and squish them just enough to grab them and hopefully not hurt one of their delicate creepy legs. And I bring them into the air, move them as fast as I can, my heart fearing for them but at the same time gagging at how disgusting they are: How much they look like they are from the age of dinosaurs, wondering how many millions of years old their species is. And then I chuck them out the window. Displacement can happen fast, in a matter of moments these little bugs are elsewhere in an unfamiliar place. At 21, I was scooped into the air and put me elsewhere, my fate unknown. From the land of the “sane” to the “insane”.