This is part of a series of vignettes by Jeffrey Derek Dosdall. It is based on real experiences.
It was a warm, humid evening in Buenos Aires. The sky was dark purple, soon to be black. My missionary companion and I were on the outskirts of a small city, near the sea of endless green fields that separated that city from the next one. This far out, the roads were dirt, and the houses were far apart. The city was still organized into blocks; actually much clearer blocks than the scrambled mess that is most of the Wasatch Front. But a block would only have a few tiny wooden houses on it, with nothing but fields and trees in between them.
My favorite blocks, though, didn’t have any houses on them. I’m not really sure how it happens, but sometimes there are blocks without any buildings on them. Grasses would grow first, but then trees would overtake them and a square-shaped forest would appear in the middle of the city. We were passing one of those blocks now on the way to the next person we would visit. There was still some grass in the block, but the trees were creeping their way forward.
“Oh my gosh, Elder, look,” my companion said. Above the grass were hundreds, no thousands, of blinking yellow lights. The whole field was sparkling like Tinker Bell. I had never seen so many in one place before. “I’ve never seen fireflies before,” my companion said.
I had. I hadn’t lived in Utah all my life like my companion. Eight years before, my family lived in a suburb near Birmingham, Alabama. In Utah, we plant trees inside our cities to make them prettier. In the South, they carve away some of the trees so they can build houses. Every empty space between buildings and roads is a thick forest. Ivy on the floor, underbrush and bushes up over your head, trees a hundred feet or taller, and vines weaving between everything to make a wall of plants. And all of it greener than spearmint.
We had such a wall of green separating our house from our neighbor’s house. Every night in the spring and summer, fireflies would come out. There was nothing funner than trying to catch them and put them all in a jar. It was a game with rules that God invented. A firefly would flash in the corner of my eye, and I would turn. It would flash again, and I would run to where I had seen the flash. But by then the flying bug had moved. So I would wait for the next flash, hunting it down flash by flash. It was like finding a submarine with sonar.
Finally I would see the black bug hovering in the dark night. Carefully, I would trap it with two hands. I would run back to my mom, who had a glass jar with air holes. I would add my firefly to the jar, which blinked with so many fireflies that you could use it as a lantern for reading. Finally the sky would turn completely black; fireflies come out during twilight. My mom would call us back. We all watched with wide eyes as she opened the jar and let the fireflies out. They would rise into the air like flashing embers from a fire, then scatter and disappear.
I was back in Buenos Aires, with a missionary tag on my chest and a job to do. But that magical moment, that teleportation to the fun of my childhood, was just what I needed to stay focused and cheerful for the rest of the night. “Yeah, fireflies are magical,” I said to my companion. Thanks, God, I thought.
The earth is beautiful. Please, help us keep it that way.
