Slow Blues
LATE ON A MID-JUNE NIGHT, I stood barefoot in the yard between our house and a field of prairie forbs. Around me fireflies blinked greenish yellow—hovering, dodging, or posing on stems. The night before, they had drawn me to the window. Now, although I’d stayed indoors for most of the past six months, their light had lured me outside.
I wore clothing infused with permethrin, a potent tick repellent, and carried a canning jar and a swatch of cheesecloth for a lid. In minutes, a fast flasher flew into the jar. It signaled frantically as I brought it indoors for inspection. Under a magnifying light I saw its red-dotted head, its tan-striped back, nearly two centimeters long, and its antennae half that length. An ivory lantern spanned two segments of its lower abdomen. Lynn Faust’s Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs (2017) told me that this specimen was probably a subspecies of Photuris versicolor—common in the eastern United States—but beyond that, I had no idea. Fireflies can be hard to distinguish without a microscope. Some are more easily identified by behavior, their blinking pattern, and the hue of their light.
I kept the beetle only long enough to examine it. I didn’t want it to miss another moment of its brief mating season, its brief adult life—a mere three or four weeks. Outside, the field was still alight. I uncapped the jar and shook it gently over the grass, but the firefly, probably petrified, didn’t leave. I set down the jar and left it there, assuming the insect would find its way out.
MY SECOND BOUT with Lyme disease had made me feel steamrollered, flat as a paper doll, limp as a deflated balloon. Some days I didn’t have the strength to sit at a keyboard and type. While I lay on the couch, my ears rang and pains stabbed at random—elbow to ankle to knee to hand. My heart would stumble, stop, suspend its work like a parachute waiting to open, then restart with a jolt.
My partner, David, and I had moved to the country 12 years earlier to try our hand at rural living and learn all we could about the land and its inhabitants. We’d made bricks from our own clay subsoil and built a house with them. We foraged and grew fruits and vegetables, heated with wood we cut from our forest, and experimented with prairie restoration. The life we’d crafted and loved required energy. Now I was walled off from that dream. I gazed out the window as the seasons came and went.
In attempts to be positive, I would ask myself, What can I do? Most days I had enough energy to hold a book and pen. So I read and took notes.
ACCORDING TO FAUST, over 2,000 species of fireflies exist worldwide, but that number is a guess. A thousand more might remain unidentified. Some are scarce, found
