magnificent thing I had ever seen with my lil' girl eyes, at the time. I would just sit there on the grass and watch them blink off and on and I thought it was such a wonder. We had recently moved from the North in Illinois to the South in Alabama. Needless to say
it was quite a change for the entire family but I think it impacted me most of all because I had never really been up close and personal with animals before or nature in general really.
My Southern male cousins loved to scare me or upset me enough to make me cry
and tonight I recall one of those times. We had gone to visit my aunt who lived way out in the countryside in Tennessee. She had a farm there and for the first time in my little girl life I saw cows and horses and chickens and pigs and ducks all up close and personal. I was absolutely amazed.
One night when darkness had just begun to fall, the fireflies or,lightning bugs, as my cousins called them appeared in the backyard near the porch. I was thrilled to pieces. My girl cousins got some mason jars from the kitchen and they began to catch the lightning bugs and say see it makes it like
a lantern for you to see by. I really didn't like putting the lighting bugs in there because I thought it was kind of mean to keep them captured in the jar.,although my girl cousins assured me that it didn't hurt them. "You can let them loose later, one of them said so I agreed to capture one in a jar and look at it
up close and personal. I remember releasing it right away because it bothered me to have it in a jar. I just knew that the lightning bug would much rather be free to shine it's light without being captured in a jar. Then some of my male cousins that had been playing on the side yards and in the front came running around
all in a loud bluster and took some of the lightning bugs that they had caught and said watch this and they smeared the lightning bugs on the posts of the porch and at first I didn't realize what had really happened. I thought that they had just released them and that they were just all lined up there on the post and then I went closer
and even though it was quite dark I could then see that the lightning bugs were dead and their light was still shining and it literally just broke my heart. I remember crying and running into the house to tell my mother. She came with me out onto the back porch and hollered at the boys and said now yall don't be killing those lightning bugs that's ugly.
and that was that and she went back in and I just stood there looking at the dead bugs and watching until the light was gone. No sign was left of their once beautiful light. That bothered me more than I can tell you because you see, I am what they call an empath. I feel things very deeply. I feel the pain of others, I mourn over the least little thing and my heart
was surely broken. I remember crying that night after I went to bed and my mother asked me what was wrong and I told her it was the lightning bugs and how they had killed them for no reason and she said well Priscilla, it was only a bug. Now they shouldn't have done that but it was only a bug.
No matter how much I tried to forget about the little bugs, I just couldn't put it out of my mind that the little lighting bugs had been killed in such a brutal way and still left their light behind. Of course over the years I have seen and felt more hurt than that of the loss of the lightning bugs but I can't think of anything now more profound than the fact that some people only want to shine
and it seems that no matter how high they fly or how much they shine to light the sky of others, in the end they just die and all that remains is a little light that will soon fade away. Some will read this story and think it completely foolish and irrelevant in this modern world of technology. But I, the firefly advocate still remember the sweet little lights, how they shined and what it meant to me.
If you feel insignificant tonight and feel like your light is no bigger than that of a tiny firefly, let me assure you, that light no matter how small is a very BIG deal to someone somewhere. Please keep on shining until the very end.
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