One can barely breathe outside right now. It's a quarter to ten at night, it's still 89° and it's very humid. The air is like a warm blanket and it's hard to draw a deep refreshing breath.

But the lightning bugs are awash in delight. It must be perfect weather for fireflies because we saw many dozens of them tonight, flashing merrily in the twilight gloom in the grass and the bushes at the side of the road. They're cruising our front lawn and the weedy creek bank across the street.

I remember the first time I saw fireflies--I don't ever remember seeing them at home, even in the weeds. Maybe the climate in that part of New England just wasn't right for them. But one summer we took a bus tour to the Pennsylvania Dutch country. We went to Straussburg [sp?], Pennsylvania, and saw all sorts of delightful things, including "Roadside America," a huge miniature train layout with about a dozen trains running through an old-fashioned neighborhood, cityscape, mountain village, circus grounds, lumber camp, wilderness, lake area, etc., ate our very first piece of shoo-fly pie (wow--just like eating the contents of a sugar bowl!), and went to the Hershey factory (of course).

The tourguide was a young fellow, probably about only ten years older than the five of us teenagers on the tour. I was the eldest of the kids at eighteen, I think the others were fourteen through sixteen. The hotel we stayed at was in the middle of fields of corn. They provided bicycles free of charge to the guests and our guide took the five of us, with our parents' permission, on a bike ride after supper. (We got back long after dark and our parents chewed out the poor guy.)

It was a great ride. We never went near any heavy traffic, just in the back through the roads past the cornfields. There was a place there called the "Straussburg Railroad" which had some old-fashioned cars and a steam engine on it. We found out this is where they had filmed the railroad train scene in Funny Girl.

Anyway, there were hundreds of little fireflies all over the cornfields. I was absolutely delighted (no pun intended). I'd read about kids catching fireflies for years, but never seen a "lightning bug" in person. When we got back to the hotel room and my folks were over their fright, I joked that "God was out taking pictures tonight with little flashcubes."

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:47:00 PM

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