Lightning Bugs

I can't stop thinking about fireflies. Or lightning bugs, a name I love.

When my sister, Karen, lived in Honduras, I went to visit her during a very hot time of the year. She taught at a little school in the middle of a palm oil plantation - her backyard was bordered by a jungle. One night we watched fireflies that looked like floating lightbulbs, meander through the palms. They were so much bigger than the fireflies here. There was no ambient city-light to interfere with the opaque blackness of the jungle or to diminish the beauty of the fireflies.

I miss fireflies. When I was a child, we used to see them in the overgrown apple orchard behind our house. Then I moved to the city and stopped seeing them. They are hypersensitive to pesticides, which I think is why they are less common than they used to be. I saw them again, in abundance when Karen and I lived at the Donkey Sanctuary, near Guelph. And now that Karen has her own 17 acres of property, some of it wetland, she has fireflies again. And plenty of them; we sit up on her balcony and look out over a little sea of floating, blinking lights. It's wonderful.
But what troubles me is that I don't see them anywhere else. When I make the hour long drive home from Karen's place, I say goodbye to the fireflies and I don't see even a single one all the way home, past farms and drainage ditches and forests and houses and suburbs...

Will they come back? I really want to know. I have this anxiety about them, a "what if they don't EVER bounce back?" anxiety. We have a pesticide bylaw now in Ontario which should work in their favour but I keep hearing that people don't respect the bylaw and use pesticides anyway. And farmers are still spraying pesticides and herbicides on their fields; that's not likely to change anytime soon...

Some days I feel like I'm just putting in time, waiting for the fireflies to come back. Then maybe I'll be able to relax.