06/16/2026
You only know me as two weeks of light in June. I worked toward those two weeks for the better part of two years.
I'm a firefly. Before I was the flash over your lawn, I was something you'd never recognize — a soft, segmented larva living down in your soil and leaf litter, glowing faintly in the dark where no one was watching.
And I wasn't idle down there. I'm a hunter. All that time, I tracked the slugs and snails and soft grubs moving through the damp, followed their slime trails, and cleared them out one by one. The "pests" you fight in the garden all summer? My whole childhood was eating them. The healthier your soil, the more leaf litter you leave, the longer you let the grass grow at the edges — the more of us you raised without ever knowing it.
Then this month, after all that time in the dark, I climbed up and changed. I traded the soil for the air. And now I have almost no time left at all.
The light you see is me looking for a mate, blinking a code only my own species answers. Each kind of firefly has its own rhythm — a long slow pulse, a quick double, a drifting J low over the grass. I get a couple of weeks to find the right answer in the dark. That's it.
Two things end me early: a spotless yard with no damp corners for my young, and a porch light or a lawn chemical that drowns out my signal or kills my larvae before they ever glow.
So if you want more of me next June, the work happens now — underground, in the dark, where you'll never see it.
Leave a wild corner. Kill the lights. The flash you love started two years ago in the soil you almost cleaned up.
