“Summer,” an original painting copyright Susan A. Walton, S. A. Walton Studio, Hudson, Florida.

Lightning bugs in flight as night falls.

Artist’s note:

Summer Wonder

For many kids in the Midwest, summer was lightning bug season, when we could occupy ourselves with seeing how many fireflies we could catch. Early on we'd try to keep them, but after a while we realized that it was better to let them go. With such a short life span, why keep them in a jar?

While lightning bugs were abundant in the suburbs where we lived, they were particularly populous in the Ozarks, where there was more than one species.

We would spend the days on the farm working with Mom or Dad at the many tasks a patch of land can require, later climbing the big pine trees to perch at the top with our faces to the sun, part of the great roaring tumult of branches that forever try to capture the wind. After climbing down from the big trees we would invariably end up at the pond, where we would fish until the afternoon grew old and evening approached, the low sun beating on our backs, and watch snapping turtles bubbling here and there in the pond before us or poking their heads up to see if we'd gone home yet.

As evening fell the other animals grew restless and we would hear them creeping their way down towards the water. Soon, the frogs would start to kick in with their evening calls. Right about the time the bats emerged to skim a drink from the water, when the valley was cast deep in shadow by its steep western hill, Mom would begin her calls.

They were insistent calls, I might add.

"Come on! Time for supper!"

That, of course, was also the time the fish really started to bite.

"Supper! Time to come in!" The bobber would wobble and dip under as the bluegill tested the bait. Ploop. Ploop.

It was the time when our loyalties to family were challenged.

"Come on! Get in here!"

Ploop, ploop, ploop went the bobber.

It was the time when that old biblical command to honor thy father and thy mother would weigh ever so heavily upon our sunburned shoulders, like the responsibilities old Moses must have felt with those stone tablets in his hands. Well, not quite... but you get the idea.

PLUNK.

Under the bobber went, and off across the pond the line would go in the dim light, parting cottonwood fluff and a reflected band of sparse early evening stars along the way.

Who was this 'Mom' person anyway?

About that time we'd find out. Dad, annoyed at the unanswered calls, would let us know just who this person was: "HEY!"

Our hearts would grow as cold as the spring fed creek flowing into the pond at that first shout. We'd see him there, or rather, see his white t-shirt out by the chicken house gate, wreathed in thin bluish woodsmoke. ( Or were those fumes? )

"HEY! You heard your Mother! When she calls you, GET YOUR ____ IN HERE !"

( Egad. Could a Voice from burning bush sound more commanding than that truck-driving pug-faced wanna-be farmer we called lovingly called 'Dad?' )

Time to haul in those corks and hooks and get our ____ back to the house, by which time the fumes- or smoke- would have dissipated somewhat, and Dad would be busily arranging our motley collection of buckets and chairs as seats for the evening's dinner. Mom would be fiddling with paper plates and forks and a can of pork n' beans. (Pork n' beans were a staple in our household.)

In back of the house was a big sycamore tree from which we could gather suckers to use as hotdog sticks, and this we eagerly did with our pocketknives. For some reason the boys, and Dad, always managed to find a sucker which had a fork in it- the kind which could be whittled into the much coveted double-weenie/double marshmallow stick.

We would then gather around the fire and toast our own dinner on our green sycamore sticks, watching sparks rise into the ever deepening sky. Other lights would rise too; like the lightning bugs with their eerie green lanterns.

After the first package of hotdogs my younger big brother and I would get distracted for a while, and we would spend some time darting across the fields catching as many lightning bugs as possible in jars or coffee cans before returning for more hotdogs to cook or marshmallows to toast, peel, eat the crispy parts, and toast again.

One night we collected quite a few fireflies, and that night was a special one because grandmother was spending the weekend with us. Grandmother was the world's best storyteller, as far as our untutored generation knew. Well, she was the only one we knew at the time and it seems she passed on the skill because my brothers are both gifted in that arena. ( Now even the son of one of my brothers is showing the classical signs. He no doubt is a child prodigy. )

But at the time Grandma was THE storyteller. Her specialty was the spooky even sometimes dark story, the kind of ghost story people in southeast Missouri were apt to tell, and she would bring these tales out, along with some more earthly experiences from her own childhood, to raise the hairs of us more suburban types, like the time a panther followed her home in the woods, back when panthers still roamed the woods this far east.

She didn't let us down this night. She was in peak form, as a matter of fact. To make it more interesting, that part of Missouri was recently hit with a cattle mutilation ala 'Art Bell,' and it was all over the news, even if no one had heard of Art Bell yet. It seems a part of the local culture of which up to then we hadn't yet been aware was the belief that UFOs were known to emerge from Lake Wappapello or Clearwater Lake and would fly about at night freaking out the people of Piedmont. The cattle mutilation thing was thus of great note to some of the residents, who weren't aware that the region was a good flyway for testing aircraft because of its low population and central location, away from prying eyes and equipment. McDonnell Douglas was, after all, based in St. Louis and at this time both the Harrier and the Eagle were under development. Other aircraft prototypes were also being tested there which we could often hear and delight in as they broke the sound barrier during daylight hours.

The excitement of all these strange happenings made for very good campfire story listening. Grandmother spun a tale about something terrifying creeping up the stairs, then another about a sad and deadly marriage night and another of ghosts on the highway trying to flag drivers down, amid other things.

After even the whippoorwills had gone silent for the night, and the fire was mere embers, she finished with the story she had recently heard about the UFOs of the lake. It was a good match to the strange news we had heard on the radio about the cattle, while driving back from a swim at Black Bridge.

By then we were fairly exhausted and it was getting quite cold. The valley was always cold at night, even if in the daytime it had been up to 100 degrees or so. So we went into the four-roomed house and washed up using the crude means available in a house without a water heater, checked for ticks, put campho phenique on our chigger bites, and set aside our things, including our pocket knives, change, lightning bug cans, flashlights and clothes which were covered, as usual, with the sticky triangular plant seeds called 'beggerlice.'

We set up our cots with clean sheets for everyone. The guest of honor was given a good spot in the room with the pot-bellied stove, and my brother Ron ended up in that room too, in the place I usually put my cot, while I ended up in his place in another room. I had jammed my cot in front of a closet mirror.

For a little house it had a lot of mirrors and equally spaced windows... even a massive front door made with heavy, though now aged and rippled beveled glass; in the daytime it was remarkably light inside for a house deep in a wooded valley. Perhaps that was because a previous owner had been an artist in need of good light, or maybe just because the builder had been a practical person who simply put the window right squat in the middle of every wall, and the doors in easy places too.

All those windows and a linoleum floor made for a cold house, so I dove into my cot hoping I wouldn't have to get up until morning for ANY reason, and drifted off to sleep.

I woke up later on to the sound of voices, but it wasn't fully morning. Grandmother was up and about and my parents were, as well. Something else was up with them, because they seemed to have taken an unnatural interest in the front door.

It seems grandmother had gotten up in the night and spotted a UFO out in the front pasture, which was not a common sight for us since we were not locals accustomed to UFOs from the bottom of Lake Wapapello. She had my parents in the other room whispering and looking at the object too. It was a full-blown glowing flying saucer, looking like a fluorescent cigar hovering just a few feet off of the ground, and was flashing or pulsing regularly and slowly.

From what I could gather, listening to them in the dark, they were backed a little ways from the door and could see it out both the front door and the front window. It was incredible, and had no landing gear or markings that they could tell. they watched it for many minutes trying to figure out what to do, if anything. Grandmother didn't take her eyes off of it.

Or so they say. I was buried under my blankets and still debating whether even a UFO was worth the shock of placing my warm bare feet on that chilly linoleum, when my brother woke up to the whispering chatter around him. He listened as grandmother described how she came to spot the thing and how she had gotten mom and dad without waking up.

Ron got up rather quickly (for a teenager) and peered out. Baffled, not much prone to the UFO fad, and as fearless as the years are long, he looked around and saw what even our folks hadn't noticed: There was a UFO in every window.

Now that didn't make sense. It was difficult enough to believe we rated one UFO, much less several. And when he looked at one window, he figured out what to do right then. It didn't take long; he came over to my cot and reached underneath it to get a coffee can. When he did so the magnificent UFO in the front yard took off.

It seems that the lightning bugs in our can had taken to flashing in sync with one another, and the transparent lid was reflected in the nearby wardrobe mirror, onto the window, and in turn onto another window, and so forth, until at last the pulsing oval green light was reflected onto the front door's plate glass where grandmother had encountered it.

Thanks to Ron, I didn't have to put my feet on that cold floor to deal with my curiousity. But thanks to those lightning bugs, I had a chance to see in that dim predawn light, the look of childlike wonder and awe on my grandmother's and parents' faces. What a beautiful sight!

Copyright 2002, Susan A. Walton