Once We Were Hunters

My brother caught the first firefly of the year tonight. For some reason, he brought it in the house, imprisoning it gently in a loose fist, as you must. It wasn't long before the wily insect snuck out the gap formed by his curled thumb and pointer and fluttered around a bit, entertaining us between dinner and dessert. Oh, we set it free before the strawberry shortcake was served, but what memories it stirred.

When I was a kid we used to spend most of our summer evenings from dusk until dark chasing fireflies. My mom punched holes in the top of a Skippy jar, and my brother and sister and I worked to capture as many lightning bugs as we could. Unlike a lot of the other kids, we never tore their lights off or smeared their luminescence on the sidewalk or wall. To us, that dull yellowish glow was nothing but an ugly shadow of the bright flash of a living insect. To make it interesting, we set  nightly quotas for ourselves, upping the target to an impossible number of bugs as the days warmed and both our hunting proficiency and the population of our quarry reached their peaks.

What does 500 lightning bugs in a peanut butter jar look like?

We never found out, and although others might have kept their captives overnight in an effort to make it to that magic number in a day or two, we never did. The rule was to let all of them go at the end of the evening: a glass jar lies sideways in tall grass, lid tossed carelessly nearby; scores of fireflies crawl out into the cooling air, scale the nearest green blade to its very top, and then with wings beating in a silent blur, blink once and are gone. At least that's how I imagine it, because we were already fast asleep in bed by then.