Fireflies danced around me as I mowed tonight. Their little bursts didn’t quite light my way, but it’s like they ushered in the darkness, telling me it was time to put away my little mower and wait. Like they had some rendezvous with magic just inside the darkness.

I’ve always loved fireflies, but didn’t realize what a privilege it was to have them as a part of “ordinary” until I got an email at work. It was a query from a woman in Colorado who was asking for the best state park to view fireflies. She explained that fireflies don’t exist west of Kansas. Her mother was dying of cancer and expressed a wish to see fireflies before she passed. With tears in my eyes, I recommended several of our parks in the western part of the state. When I inquired later, she told me they had a glorious day driving to our park with the top down on the car and saw hundreds of fireflies. Her mother died two weeks later.

And I remembered the night hike at our Capital Campout, with about a hundred first-time campers and their parents. An AmeriCorps member led our hike, while staff (me) and volunteers brought up the rear, riding “drag” as it were on the “herd” of tenderfeet ahead of us. In the city park that is basically the front yard of Cedar Crest, the Kansas governor’s mansion, the hike took us around a pond, and it was like we stepped through a magical portal to an ethereal world. While various species of frogs sang a chorus, a cloud of fireflies blinked in frenzied communication, lighting the night around us. Bats, owls and nighthawks hunted silently above us. We heard a twig snap in the forest behind us; probably a big deer. The sound of I-70 just a mile away was muted by the hills and trees. For several minutes, all of us were caught by nature’s spell.

If you live where fireflies abound, count yourself blessed, and sit in the dark and watch. If you’ve never seen a firefly, I hope you put that on your bucket list.