23 June (2002), c. 0245-0315 CDT, in my backyard on City Lake, Putnam Co., Tennessee.

A victim of insomnia, I am nonetheless enjoying the midsummer firefly fireworks--and revealing my origins in the Northeast, where fireflies, not lightning bugs, erratically illuminate the evenings and nights.  Everywhere in my backyard, brief pulses of light are flickering from lawn level up ten to twenty meters into the canopy.  So many are the fireflies within sight on this calm, clear night that at least twenty are "lighting up" every second somewhere within my view during the entire thirty minutes that I witness their spectacular bioluminescence, which to my mind greatly exceeds in beauty the coming Fourth of July lightshows that will brighten evening skies across the country in celebration of the Declaration of Independence 226 years ago.  The fireflies not only offer greater optical pleasure than human-created fireworks, but they, too, could be said to offer their lightshow in celebration, in their case of a natural event--the summer solstice--rather than a political one. For many millions of years fireflies have lighted the night skies most intensely near the time of the solstice, and with any luck they will continue their work for many millions of additional years, marking the abrupt transition from a period of 182.62 "days" with increasing daylight each day and decreasing darkness each night to a period of 182.62 "days" with decreasing daylight each day and increasing darkness each night.  At one time in our past humans were more acutely aware of this great transitional moment than we are now, but the fireflies are there to remind us of its presence deep within the fabric of existence, deeper than anything human has ever been or may ever be.