Dear Reader: Please enjoy this week’s reflection, the last one Your New Favorite Writer will post before a major surgical operation. I’m not sure how many weeks it will be before it’s convenient for me to post again, but have no fear. I’ll get back to you. Cheers.

When I was a boy, in the 1950s, my grandparents had the biggest elm tree in Knox County, Illinois.

It stood in the front yard of their modest residence at 112 Public Square in the little town of Knoxville. It overspread and shaded their large side yard, next to K.G. Klinck’s Mortuary. The tree was at least six feet in diameter, with probably a twenty-foot girth, and they had built a brick wall around its base, perhaps to honor its fame.

The summers were hot—more so than many Wisconsin friends have ever experienced—but we were dauntless. Summer evenings were spent in the yard, picnicking under the huge elm. On Saturday nights the town band mounted the octagonal bandstand in the park across the street and reduced Sousa’s Washington Post March and The Stars and Stripes Forever to glittering shreds of sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Folks in cars parked around the square beeped their horns in applause.

The air was warm and sultry, even at night. Fireflies, which we called lightning bugs, painted rising commas of green glow upon the dark as grownups digested rhubarb pie and we kids—Cousin Steve, Aunt Linda, and I—scooped winged luminaries from the black air and jailed them in mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the lids. 

 It was all great fun for us; and we found, when we posted bond for them next morning, that most of our prisoners had survived the night.

Now, seventy years later, I sit in Madison, Wisconsin—more than two degrees of latitude north of Knoxville, Illinois—and cannot help smiling at a familiar sight: lightning bugs, flashing profusely all over my backyard. There are not as many as Grandma had in her yard way back when. But when we first moved to Madison, fifty-five years ago, we seldom saw them at all.

The earth is warming, friends. That’s not a political statement, it’s a simple observation. I don’t know if there’s anything we can or should do. I find the fact congenial, because I’ve always liked warm better than cold. Nowadays, fireflies or lightning bugs are a common sight in south central Wisconsin, and we’re much enriched by it.

I sit in my backyard lounge chair, and a little green lantern rises beside me. I could close my hand and capture it. But, why? 

Live and let live, I say. Look at it from the insect’s point of view: To be held in an old man’s fist, or trapped in a glass vessel, even one with air-holes in the top: Neither seems as wholesome as the free air. 

Anyway, I don’t need a collection of lightning bugs. What I need is what they signify: Little bits of luminance, chopping the enveloping night into understandable spheres.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer