God's Little Flashcubes

As I was walking Tucker in the half-light before nightfall, I watched the fireflies winking between the houses in the neighborhood and around the trees and shrubs that surround the retaining pond. One flew just under my nose and I cupped my hand and almost caught it as it flashed.

Nostalgia books talk about small children catching fireflies in the twilight, but I had never seen any in my life, at least until 1974.

Dad and Mom wanted to visit Washington, DC, in the 1970s, but Dad was wary about driving there, so we took a Colette bus tour instead. We had a wonderful time, and still remember the name of our guide, Nick, and our bus driver, Jerry. We saw many wonderful things, including Waltz of the Toreadors with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson at the Kennedy Center (opposite which was that fascinating building in the news, Watergate!). The bus tour vacation went so well, in fact, that we went on another tour in 1974, to the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Once again on a big comfy tour bus, me with our camera in hand and my travel diary (a big bound Strathmore art book) under my arm, we visited the rolling, verdant countryside around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, popping in at Roadside America, a fabulous miniature landscape and train layout built by all one family, just off I-78; the Hershey chocolate welcome center, with its ride showing you how chocolate is made and the sweet treats at the end; and of course to an obligatory Dutch feast, complete with our first taste of shoo fly pie, which I remembered from Lois Lenski's regional America novel, Shoo-Fly Girl. The thought still makes my teeth hurt (but boy, it was good).

But the event I remember best wasn't part of the tour.

The hotel we stayed at was a big white Colonial style structure in the middle of an oasis of gas stations and restaurants, surrounded by harrowed and corn-filled fields, farm houses filled with men, women, and children wearing black and white, and livestock. There was nothing much to do at night, but the place provided bicycles free of charge to the paying guests, and our tour guide, who was a good looking young man I'll call "Phil," noticed that a couple of the youngest tour members, one fifteen-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old, were bored. He asked their parents and myself, since the rest of the tour members were forty and upwards, if they would give us permission to go on a bike ride with him after supper. We would just make a circle of the countryside where there was little traffic and come back well before dark. Sure, they said.

I was crazy to go. I'd only been riding a bike for three years and the prospect of being able to ride through a landscape beside the road between my house and my best friend's house was intoxicating. So Phil led his little parade of young ladies into the PennDutch countryside and we rode and rode. We whizzed past fields of crops thick and green, but not yet ready for harvest (it was the first week of July, when Trifari customarily closed down for vacation); herds of cows still thoughtfully chewing on the long stems of grass in their pastures even as the sun set, glossy black-and-white bodies dotting the landscape; farmers driving teams of horses home after a long day's worth of harrowing. Handsome brown Standardbred horses pulling Amish buggies passed us occasionally, a flicking whip dancing on the dashboard. We stopped to see a train car displayed from the Strasburg Rail Road collection, parked out in a field of corn next to a post-and-rail fence right out of Lassie, advertising the attraction—it had been used in the Barbra Streisand film Funny Girl.

I think Phil got lost. I cast anxious eyes as the sun went lower, and lower, turning into a blaze of red as it balanced on the rim of the horizon and then slowly melted into it, leaving bands of pink and orange to mark its passage. The darkening blue of the sky spread from east to west to swallow the last of the color, and one by one, little lamps were lit in the sky. I knew that back at the hotel, Mom was "making buttons" and Dad was probably starting to steam. And then I completely forgot everything else.

With open-mouthed awe I noticed that the sky wasn't the only place marked by stars. In the vast cornfields we kept passing, pale green flashes appeared and disappeared, winking in and out rhythmically, and I realized with delight that these were fireflies, my very first fireflies, just like in all those books I read. We stopped for a while for Phil to get his bearings and for us to take a breather, but I paid no attention to the company anymore. My eyes were hypnotized by those marvelous little sparks of light, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, going off again and again like flashcubes at a wedding. Until another night in the future brought us the stars of Arizona, this was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I stared at the open field until the sight was burned into my memory.

Phil got us back, tired, perspiring, and breathless, to face an anxious and angry clot of parents, including mine. I suspect he may have gotten fired after that expedition. But I went to bed with a smile on my face and stars in my eyes, all unknowingly supplied by "God's little flashcubes."