The porch after dark

"God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." — Genesis 1:31

Saturday evening and I am on the back porch in the dark and the fireflies have come.

They were not here last week. They are here tonight. They came the way everything in June comes, which is without announcement and all at once, and the yard is full of them, that slow green blinking that has no pattern you can learn and no purpose you can name except the oldest purpose, which is finding each other in the dark.

I have been watching them for ten minutes. The porch light is off because the porch light draws moths and the moths are a nuisance and also because the dark is the point tonight. The dark is where the fireflies do what they do. You cannot see them in the light.

There was a summer when the children were small and Becca caught fireflies in a jar and we watched them blink inside the glass and I made her let them go before bed, and she did, and they floated up out of the jar like something released from a sentence. I do not know why that memory came tonight except that the yard looks the way it looked then, thirty-some years ago, the same green blinking in the same dark.

The creek is going. The air is warm and it smells like cut grass and honeysuckle and the particular sweetness that June gives to the evening when the day has been hot and the ground is letting the heat go. I have nowhere to be. Nothing is required of me. The fireflies do not need me to watch them but I am watching them anyway, because this is what Saturday evening is for when you are seventy-seven and the week has been long and the porch is here and the dark is good.

Lord, the dark is good.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.