firefly summer

last night while coming home from a party, my boys alerted me to look outside the car window. "what?" i said. "what am i suppose to be looking at?"
"look at the fireflies, mom!"
"awe, yes, i see!" i said. "they are cool, huh?"
as the boys were talking animatedly in the back seat about their new discovery, (having grown up in florida, they have never seen fireflies before, and among them, my husband) i allowed my mind to wander to a distant past. one filled with cool summer evenings, barefeet in the grass, late night games with neighborhood friends and the always anticipated; fireflies. yes, my childhood summer nights. i was immediately swallowed up in the smells and feelings of those summer nights, firefly nights. we knew that when the fireflies came out we only had about an hour left to play outside. we would quickly organize our remaining time into the most meaningful hour of the day. suddenly we played like it was the last time we would ever play. with all our hearts and souls, we would engage into the most fun we could muster up.we felt so old to be able to play past dark. our imaginations quickly at work, we tumbled, chased, jumped, hid, and cartwheeled our way to a magical world where we ruled the night skies. we were the gods, then.

as the night rapidly flew, our time coming to an end, i recalled to myself, seeing and hearing my mother calling to us from the front porch."time to come in!" she would yell. i can still see her sillouette against the white house, under the porch light. this memory warmed me now, but it didn't back then. this was the signal that our time was up. it meant it would suspend our nightly godhood for one whole day more. what an eternity a day was back then. the evenings stretched on forever.

i remembered the smells of the cool grass on my barefeet. the feel of the wind rushing past my face as i chased my friends, the hard concrete on my back as we laid on the sidewalk to count the stars. endless the night seemed with the stars stretching on in the blackness forever. we actually tried to count them all, well who didn't?

i remembered the taste of freshly picked mulberries and the juicy stains that accompanied them. the feeling of endless pleasures and the sounds of laughter that drifted up to the heavens. blowing blades of grass between my lips, riding bikes down the middle of the road and skating down the sidewalk, sometimes on one foot, as to share the other skate with a sister. :)

at the moment that these memories washed over me, i was bathed in a blanket of homesickness. one i haven't felt since last summer. i think i have felt it every summer since. summers just don't add up to those anymore. though i am a grown up woman now and know the evils of time(that much never changes, no matter how old you get) and i can't do a cart wheel very often any more, i can dig in my memory box and pull out a lifetime's worth of summer nights, they are always with me. and i can now enjoy passing these summer traditions on to my children, who are now discovering what it is to be a child in a firefly summer.....

it begins again.