Second Star to the Right

by Kristina Spencer

Ask anyone who knows me: I'm a girl with big feelings. I cry at dolphin shows. I cry while singing the national anthem at baseball games. I cry during tender hobbit embraces. I cry... well, you get the picture. Big feelings.

And this is true from way back. I wasn't the kid you'd find frying ants with a magnifying glass or pulling the wings off house flies. Not because I didn't want to touch said insects, but because... well... it would have hurt them.

Bear this fact in mind so that you might judge me less harshly when I tell you that I have a very clear memory of doing mortal harm to a few lightning bugs (or fireflies, if you prefer) one summer night in 1976. I'd like to say it was an accident...that I left them in a jar for too long without air or water (a frequent and somewhat more forgivable cause of bug mortality). But no—it was deliberate. I was six and the poor guys were simply in the wrong yard at the wrong time.

What prompted this insecticidal rampage? What summertime madness turned a good-hearted little girl into a killer of beings harmless and blinky? Two words: Peter Pan.

***

I grew up in southern Michigan, though I've been a Seattle resident for four years now, and I know I don't have to tell anyone how glorious summers in the Northwest are...once they finally start, of course. (Sometime in July... if we're lucky.) But once summer hits its stride, we're blessed with weeks and weeks of endless sunshine, pleasantly warm but rarely hot days, and cool, dry nights. I think I feel particularly appreciative because I moved here from the Midwest—a place that in summer becomes the land of hot and humid, of sweltering and sticky, of melting and moist.

As you might guess, I don't miss Midwestern summers at all. Well, maybe just a smidge. You see, in addition to that horrible weather (and did I mention the mosquitoes?) Midwestern summers deliver two wonders that Seattle summers don't.

The first is thunderstorms—not the five-minute, two-claps-of-thunder-and-a-flash-that-might-have-been-lightning-but-could-have-been-the-neighbor's-headlights Seattle variety, but wild, down-pouring, crashing and blinding, seeming-to-go-on-forever temper tantrums of nature. Exciting and scary all at the same time, thunderstorms not only provided entertainment and a reason to sleep in my mom's bed, but usually brought blessedly cooler and drier weather after.

The second is fireflies. At dusk on the warm, humid summer nights of my childhood, the air would fill with flashes of cool yellow light. First a few, and then as dusk moved into full darkness, hundreds of blinking insects would come out and fly around, turning their lights on and off seemingly at random (though I've since learned that what my impressionable young mind was witnessing was in fact a mating dance. Yep. Hot bug-on-bug sex. What would John Ashcroft say?). We'd catch them and keep them in jars, always remembering to poke holes in the lid so that they didn't quickly become ex-lightning bugs. Then when we got tired of watching them blink, we'd release them to continue on their lighty little way.

It really was a magical sight, all that twinkling as if the stars had decided to hang out on earth for a while. I miss it each and every otherwise perfect Seattle summer night. I have to believe that falling in love with and moving to a place that is utterly devoid of these wonderful creatures is expedited karmic retribution for the sins of my youth.

The Disney animated movie Peter Pan was re-released in the summer of 1976 and my mom took me to see it; it was probably one of my first trips to the movie theater. While I was captivated by the whole experience, the thing that really struck my fancy was the flying. In order for Wendy and the boys to follow Peter to Neverland, they had to fly, and for that they needed nothing more than faith, trust, and pixie dust provided by the insanely jealous sexpot fairy Tinker Bell. Mix a few dashes of the shimmering, sparkling dust and some happy thoughts and voila! We had lift-off.

This made a lot of sense. I was six—I believed in both magic and in my own inherent, though frustratingly non-manifesting, ability to fly. And after seeing how it was done on the big screen, I knew why weightlessness eluded me.

I'm sure it was a late-afternoon matinee, because by the time I got home, had a little dinner, and made it out the door to play with my friends, dusk was drawing near. When the fireflies started to appear, everything clicked into place. With a leap of logic taken presciently from Monty Python, I realized that fireflies sparkle and fly, therefore, fireflies must be made of pixie dust! Flying wouldn't require a fairy (fortunate, as I didn't have access to one). I just needed to liberate some pixie dust from a few volunteer bugs.

I shared my plan with a couple of my girlfriends who enthusiastically joined me in my experiment. With visions of soaring over the neighborhood propelling us on, we collected a dozen or so bugs and then contemplated how exactly we might get them to give up the goods.

First we tried shaking them while they were still in the jar, the plan being that the loose dust would come out through the holes in the lid—a la a salt shaker. Everyone agreed that since it was my idea, I'd get to try it first. Shake, shake, shake... think of flying... popsicles... Christmas morning.... nothing. Not even a flutter in my stomach.

The fireflies weathered this first attempt remarkably well considering I'd just engineered the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale in their little world. No obvious casualties, though they did seem to be lighting up less frequently (Being thrown repeatedly against the sides of a glass container would tend to dampen anyone's libido, I reckon). So now what?

I figured that maybe the process needed a more personal touch; maybe I could rub some of the dust off of an individual bug if I held it in my hand. I reached into the jar and picked one out. Waiting until he lit up, I gently rubbed the body down my bare arm. Candy... swimming in the lake... playing kick the can... I ended up with a really irritated firefly (who I then let go, lucky fella) but did not myself take wing.

It was at this point that it occurred to me that it might take drastic measures to get what I was looking for. It had become clear that the pixie dust resided inside the fireflies; it couldn't be shaken or brushed loose. I cringed at the thought of what I would do next, but I was a girl on a mission, and I knew, suspected, and hoped this would work.

With my friends looking on wide-eyed, I picked out another firefly. Grasping it firmly between my fingers, I waited for the light then pressed it to my left arm. I felt the pop, and then watched with a mixture of horror and hope as I pulled it down towards my wrist, dragging what looked like yellow sparkling dust behind it. The second one, dragged along my right arm, was slightly easier, desensitized, as I had quickly become, to the violence of what I was doing.

I couldn't tell then, and I still don't know for sure, whether my feet stayed rooted to the ground because the bioluminescence of fireflies is truly not due to the presence of pixie dust, or simply because in that moment, with the evidence of my crime glowing in yellow streaks on my forearms, I was unable to think any thoughts that were quite happy enough.

***

This summer my husband and I will take our four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son back to the Midwest to visit their relatives. We'll slog through the heat and humidity (the adults will undoubtedly complain while the kids probably won't even notice), drive past lots of cornfields, and hopefully get woken up by a thunderstorm or two. And we'll get to watch the smiles spread across our kids' faces when dusk falls and they see the lightning bugs come out. Chances are, that sight will make me cry.

I'll help my little ones catch some fireflies and put them in a jar, just like when I was a kid. We'll make sure to poke holes in the top and provide some grass. And I'll teach them to be very gentle with the small black-and-red bodies so that we can release them safely back into the world to continue their beautiful mating dance another day. It's small atonement, but it's the least I can do.

Kristina Spencer is a Seattle writer, mom, and massage therapist-to-be who tries, though doesn't always succeed, to see the forest for the trees. You can read more of her musings at http://livelywrithing.blogspot.com/.