Kirkepiscatoid

(Psalm 8:3,4) "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?"

There's no doubt, in June and early July the icon of the season for me is the lightning bug. (Fireflies, to some of y'all.) In August and early September, I replace it with meteors in the night sky. But in those long days of the beginning of summer, when it takes so long to get dark (about 8:30/quarter to nine in these parts) the lightning bugs always start showing before the stars.

When I was a kid, I used to love to catch them. Fruit jars were my collection device of choice, with a few nail holes driven through the lid. Of course, you always had to put a couple blades of grass in with them (like somehow that would magically make them feel "at home") and more than one lightning bug has been sacrificed at the altar of childhood. You never believe the jar of bugs "won't keep" until the next night until you actually kept one outside overnight and awoke to find the bugs not only "not flashing" but quite dead. There were always the "runaways" who would be trying to crawl out of the jar once you opened the lid and you accidentally squished it. Of course, the tails of the accidentally squished one made dandy "pretend rings."

The other night, when I was walking right after it turned dark, I was treated to a wonderful sight. It was just dark enough the stars had come out. Literally dozens of lightning bugs were right at the tops of the hay in my hayfield, at the interface between earth and sky. It was like the stars had come down themselves to greet me. The yellow of their tails seemed to blend right into the white of the stars in the horizon, blinking almost in rhythm to the twinkling of the stars.

There are far more breathtaking spots on Earth, but I don't believe I would trade a trip to any of them for a moment like that, within the confines of my own pasture land.

"My" land. What a misnomer. Sure, there is a deed filed with the courthouse that says I own it, but the best things on it, I can never hope to own. I don't own the owl who hangs out there. I don't own the hawks that fly overhead, nor the quail that dart through my right-of-way, nor the fox who slinks around there. I don't even own the lightning bugs.