one has to be both careful and patient, and at six, I wasn’t either, so I resorted to swinging wildly in the night air, my hands cupped in chaotic prayers, hoping to scoop up a flickering light or two.
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania full of my mother’s tales of the natural world. One of my favorite stories that she told again and again was how she used to capture so many lightning bugs in a jar that she was able to read by their cold light at night. “The next day,” she said. “I let them go. They had done their job.”
As a child who often read by flashlight when the rest of the house was sleeping, a jar of glowing flickers captured in a canning jar seemed magical, far more magical than any dim, artificial light.
I readied temporary homes by poking holes in jars’ lids, but I never succeeded in capturing more than one flashing beetle at a time. My efforts grew more intense, intense enough that in my expeditions, I often accidentally tore a wing or ripped an antenna. I knew that the maimed insects would probably not survive, so I stopped.
I then decided to find someone with more expertise than I had.
The new boy who lived down the block was about my age. He played with Star Wars figures and Hot Wheels, making careful trails through his front lawn, dodging ant hills in the grass.
Because he treated nature with such care, I thought for sure he would know the trick to catching lightning bugs.
But I was wrong.
Instead, he found joy in crushing the beetles at their exact moment of glow, so that their luciferin stayed with him for hours, the shining light smeared across his hands.
“Boys will be boys,” his mother said, shaking her head while wiping his skin with a wet washcloth, all traces of radiance swiped away.
And as the dampness dried on his skin, I stared at my own hands, hoping they would never hold the same kind of cruelty.
