He’s at the treeline, blue eyes scanning the shadows for flashes.
He’s 5, and he tries hard when he wants to. At his pre-K graduation, his teacher praised his “little tongue-out face,” how it indicated to her that he was “focused, committed, in it.” Like Michael Jordan, but with Hess trucks and monkey bars.
We’ve gathered with our neighbors in the commons area of our townhome community. We eat and drink, then we hand the kids some sparklers, which give way to a messy session with s’mores.
It is the weekend of the solstice, and a few hours in good company helps us forget that half the world’s tilting one way, while the other half’s tilting toward the other.
At dusk, Laura takes our 2-year-old inside to scrub the marshmallows out of his hair, and I make the one promise we both know I can’t keep: “George and I will be in soon.”
Because soon is when the treeline flashes. Lightning bugs.
“Where do they come from?” he asks.
I could give him the AI answer, but on nights like these knowledge is the enemy of belief, so I just tell him, “They come from summer.”
“I love summer,” he says, and turns back toward the trees.
Memories fall in line like dominoes, and without warning, I’m back at my family’s river cottage, 5 again myself, and my own childhood world is whole. There’s my dad, Meemaw, and funny Uncle George — all believers of bugs and light and, to different extents, the man in the moon. My cousins are there too, 20 or so of us, long before accidents and jobs and families made our generation smaller, more stressed, more spread out. I can hear their laughs, can taste the steamed crabs and melted butter, can smell the marriage of salt and freshwater.
Can see the lightning bugs.
“Don’t slap at them,” I tell my boy, as they told me. “You don’t wanna hurt them.”
The girls from the neighborhood figure it out first, as girls tend to do. They scoop one after another, and bring them over for show and tell.
George is trying. Zig-zagging along the treeline, slapping softer and softer. His tongue’s out, and it hits me then that he may remember this, too.
The family river cottage is gone, sold at a bargain decades ago in haste to pay a few bills. Meemaw and Uncle George and Dad are gone, too. I’ve lived in Charlotte for a dozen years, in North Carolina for nearly 30. I’ve encountered many moments that told me this city, far from that old river, is where I belong. But a place is only home after you paint memories you know you won’t forget.
He plants a firefly between his palms.
In an instant, he yelps and sets it free. This I understand too, that feeling of holding a squirmy and precious life, noticing it as more than just a light in the darkness, and trying hard to cup it but not crush it, so it can keep on blinking for another summer night.
