Where Lightning Bugs Live

Postmarked: May 13th, 2026 4:03am, the basement floor of my brain

I chased lightning bugs when I was little.

I’d run around in the backyard with my sisters, out of breath, reaching my arms out in front of me, clasping my palms together quickly to capture this silly bug.

The oldest of three, I played art director, making sure they caught enough, then showing Hollins and Ansley when and where to release them, so that we could maximize the glow.

I always made sure to give the lightning bugs enough wiggle room to crawl around within the cage I’d created with my own two hands. Sometimes I’d spread my fingers slightly, just a smidge, to peek through with one eye and see the way they illuminated on and off like a light switch in the darkness.

One steamy summer night, the air thick with southern humidity, the kind where it feels like you’re inside a dog’s mouth, my sisters and I spent the entire night catching our own personal “collection”. We filled an entire jar, which we promptly carried into our home and released, so that they could “be free”.

Panic ensued.

We had to turn off every light in the house to find the lightning bugs again.

The brief season when you actually get to see lightning bugs (or fireflies, if that’s what you grew up calling them) feels almost as fleeting as that memory.

More often than I like to admit, my mind likes to dig into the arsenal of nostalgia it has tucked away in the basement floor of my brain. Those raw, tender moments sometimes feel like they get pulled out of someone else’s archive of film and thrown up onto a projector without warning, and I’m the only one in the audience.

Like a regular road trip with my family to the lake that sat thirty minutes away. We’d belt “Pink Houses” off the John Mellencamp cassette that lived in the fourteen-year-old bright red Dodge my Dad drove. On the way home, we’d stop at Sonic for a large chili cheese dog, and I wasn’t allowed to order a Dr. Pepper because it made me too hyper.

I don’t have a photo of that. It was just a Tuesday night.

And yet…

That Tuesday has outlasted a hundred moments that were “supposed” to be more important.

So much has changed, and sitting in those moments always feels bittersweet, a grief, in its own weird way. Everything is different, and I can’t get back there. No one talks about that part enough, how the ordinary things are actually the really big things, and you usually figure that out right around the time you can’t get them back.

I’ve been thinking about how we do the same thing when we travel, because being somewhere new feels like that sometimes, too.

We always aim for the highlights: the tour we booked three months out, the mountain top view at golden hour, the train ride that’s going to make people seethe with jealousy (Fine, I’ll ADMIT it). We build itineraries around the moments we’ve already decided will matter the most, and then we document them in real time, which is itself its own kind of departure from where we are, one that I am indeed very guilty of.

And then, years later, that’s not even what I remember.

We came out of the mountain range, sweaty and covered in a layer of dust. We’d taken a dip in a glacial stream, but with no way to effectively dry off, it had just made the gritty dirt stick to us more. I didn’t really have a clue where we were going to come out of the trail, but when we did, our shuttle driver, Suri, was waiting there. With a giant block of Feta and wild strawberries that were strung onto a long blade of grass.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the town we finished in if I tried, or honestly, what most of the trail we rode looked like. But I remember the excitement on Suri’s face when he saw our reaction to his gift.

Shaggy and I had just come off Lake Toya to treat ourselves to an ice cream after paddleboarding across. A Japanese man, who was having a great time with his own bottle of Sake, spotted Shaggy’s beard, which is, admittedly, a spectacle. He laughed, a deep, guttural HA HA HA, and was so delighted by this unfamiliar, chest-length red facial hair that he walked straight up to Shaggy and buried his face in it. Then he took a step backward and just began stroking the beard, all of us collectively laughing.

A moment that was definitely not listed in our guidebook, but I still remember the smell of the plastic bottle of sake he thrust upon us, which Shaggy bravely took a swig of.

We’d just finished a big kayak trip together. An actual feat of mountain-moving measures because time and adulthood and living in states separated by multiple states make it way harder than it should be to see each other.

We didn’t see any whales, which was the real draw of taking the tour, but the puffins were out in full force, and the peaks visible from the fjord were honestly enough to make the entire trip worth it.

The three of us, Hollins, Ansley and I, got into the car to drive back into Seward. When Hollins pulled up her phone to connect it to the radio. We chattered and fussed at each other, because … sisters, and then we heard that distinctive guitar riff come through the stereo. We rolled down our windows, turned the song Hollins had selected all the way up and started in, “Well, there’s winners and there’s losers, but they ain’t no big deal…” Pink Houses blasting through the speakers and our voices wafting into the wind as we hollered the lyrics.

Every time I’m somewhere, I think about how I’ll never be able to fully return to it. That sounds way more depressing than I intend for it to be, because I actually think there’s so much beauty in that statement.

You can go back to a place, but you can’t go back to the version of yourself who was there the first time. Sometimes, I think I always make sure to take the bad quality iPhone photo because a part of me is already grieving the memory I’m standing in. The moment you leave, it becomes this intangible thing that you’ll only ever half remember. All of those weird, wacky, human moments that actually made the place a place won’t happen again.

Fleeting. All of it.

The backyards. The Tuesdays. The trip you spent your life savings on. The trip you just took down the road. The humans that weave in and out of your stories.

It was the cusp of summer last year and almost my niece’s bedtime, but we went outside. In her mismatched pajamas that were haphazardly thrown on, her tie-dye crocs and a cookie in hand, I helped her chase the glowing lights we saw blinking like a light switch on and off in the night.

I should have mentioned that lightning bugs make me sentimental.

Now go catch some.