Tiny flashes of light by the edge of the yard earlier this summer caught my eye. Could it be? When I was a child in rural Connecticut, a favorite summer night activity was sitting on our front stone steps with a glass jar trying to catch fireflies. Within minutes, the jar would be filled, a homemade lantern of delight.
When my kids were young, I’d hoped to pass on this simple bit of homemade fun, but we didn’t have any fireflies here that I ever saw. Even nighttime excursions for ice cream with a drive by the nearby marsh yielded no sightings. It seemed pesticides, light pollution and habitat loss had all contributed to the destruction of these magical beings.
Until one night this past July. It was still too hot from a recent heat wave to light our outdoor firepit so the yard was dark as I settled in to spot the first stars emerging on the palette of the blackening sky. Suddenly, to my right, toward the garden and bordering trees, bright, small lights flickered. The lights moved up, down, right, left — fireflies!
Engaged in a nocturnal dance of their own making. Wow, what a gift! Then they were gone. I watched for them many summer nights after that one, but they never came again. My daughter warned me, trying to protect my heart, “Mom, stop looking for them, you’re always going to be disappointed.” Ah, she didn’t yet understand that just the possibility they might return, the glimmer of hope, was enough for me. I was grateful I saw them, and that gratitude wasn’t dimmed by not seeing them again.
I did some out-of-season pruning this summer, too. My favorite tree, a white birch, had some off-kilter extra growth that threatened its overall health, and a lilac bush I’d planted at about a foot tall had overgrown its place at the front corner of the yard, requiring a radical trim-back. Our prized tree, a red sugar maple at the back of the property, providing shade, privacy and the delight of changing colors, had also grown to take over its neighbor, a Kousa dogwood. We planted the maple in honor of our son’s birth and the dogwood for our daughter’s more than two decades ago. Last year, the Kousa didn’t flower at all for lack of sunshine.
The maple’s pruning was brutal and necessary. When it was done, the dogwood stood newly revealed. But the missing lower branches of the much larger tree left the yard feeling exposed. Is there such a thing as letting too much light in, I fretted?
Regardless of my fretting, the pruning deed was done and irreversible. I placed some Adirondack chairs where a gap had been opened in the tree line to draw the eye, and sat back, somewhat appeased.
I’m thinking of the words arising from my summer activities, pruning and possibility, as meteorological fall has begun. Many families are doing the opposite of pruning this time of year, adding sports and school to an always too-full schedule.
I’m in a different stage of life and find myself pruning activities and habits that no longer feel right, metaphorically letting more light in, welcoming the opportunity of new chapters, even hurtful ones.
The lilac bush hasn’t recovered well from its trimming, and it looks like we may lose it. I am sad, but accept nature taking its course.
Harder to accept is that we will soon bury the ashes of our beloved pup in the ground between the maple and the dogwood. It seems the perfect resting spot, a reverent place between the symbols we planted in honor of our children. I know I’ll gaze there often in the fading light of future summers, hopeful that the flickering light of the fireflies will return, illuminating my grief and gratitude.
