"The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead."

-W.H. Auden

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Prognostication By Firefly

I was outside watching the stars the other night when a meteor flamed across the sky. Close. Really close. Right above my head. Wait a minute, that can't be right. 

I looked up and saw another another. Ah, a firefly, obviously. But it was flying fast, in a swooping trajectory that left a trail of light. It was easy to see how I'd mistaken it for a shooting star at first. 

Not that I'm an expert, but this wasn't the usual low hover and slow blink of the local insects that makes them so easy to catch.  Its behavior seemed odd, even erratic.

The last two evenings, just at twilight, the fireflies have been crazy active, fast blinking. Sometimes the hedgerows seem lit from the inside. It's a beautiful thing to see, this luminescent mating ritual. But I get this feeling that the fireflies are so busy because they know time is getting short. There's more than a little desperation in the air. 

Granny Clampett never said anything about predicting the weather by fireflies, but I'll take a crack at it - I predict a change in the weather. I suspect Autumn will come early this year.

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