“What are you doing?”

“We’re going hunting for fireflies.”

“We live in Arizona. In the desert. There are no fireflies.” My mother stood over us, looking down. I remember the look she had on her face. It was a mixture of bemusement and anger. She always looks a bit angry. Perhaps it’s the shape of her face.

My brother and I stood in her gaze by the back door. It was twilight. We’d heard it was optimal firefly catching time. Our source was very reliable. Very. We had a jar, complete with lid and we’d made a net to catch the elusive bugs with. We were prepared.

Neither of us had ever seen a firefly, but we knew they existed. We’d seen them in books and on television. But here we were, prepared and ready to catch one of these strange, glowing bugs in our jar and we were being blocked. Blocked by this angry and bemused face.

“It’s late and getting dark.”

“Uh huh … we’ll be back before it gets all dark.” My brother fidgeted with the jar, twisting the lid on and off. I held the net in my hands and just stared. Despite the fact that I was older, it was understood that my brother was the spokesman. For some reason, whenever he asked, they always said yes. If I asked, the answer was invariably no. It was parent logic I still haven’t quite grasped.

“Alright, get back soon.” With that, my mother removed herself as our obstacle. We darted outside before she had the chance to change her mind. She did that often. We’d get permission and when we returned, she’d act as if we had done something against her wishes. That angry face would positively glower at us as if we had somehow broken her favorite dish or put a baseball through a window. It was like she couldn’t figure out how to feel, so she just let her angry face take over. Like it was her inborn state of being. Maybe that’s why she always looked half angry. Or, perhaps it really was the shape of her face.

Either way, our obstacle was gone. Being kids, we didn’t worry about the future anger, just the immediate permission. It didn’t really matter to us, we were used to it: the stop-change-turn of the tides. So we set off in search of our fireflies.

We walked into the yard. We had no fence, nothing to separate us from the desert. We wandered through the creosote and cholla. We knew where every thorn was in those days. Even in the half-light of twilight, we knew exactly where not to step. We had often gotten the fallen bits of cholla in our socks where it eventually made its way into skin and then everywhere. The thorns were tricky, but, this was our secret garden. There was no door and no key, but it was ours and we knew all of its mysteries. So, we navigated our way into the back, deeper into the desert.

This was before there were other houses on the lots behind ours, so it was several acres of desert and nothing more. Our house sat alone at the end of the long drive. We always went into the backyard, which I now think of as odd because our front yard was just as wild and untamed and large. But, it was how we did things. The back is always more mysterious than the front.

We walked along the trails that we had formed from use, careful not to step into snake holes and upon cactus. We walked to the largest tree we had in our yard, an ancient paloverde. It was large enough for us to climb and sit in it. This says something about the size of the paloverde, most were too weak and brittle for us to climb in. Our source had told us that the best place to catch fireflies was by a tree. We had built a small fort at the base of the tree out of saguaro ribs and sagebrush. Really, it was more of a wall and a poor excuse for a roof, but to us, it was our fortress. The saguaro ribs were brittle so we took special care not to disturb them.

We were sitting, waiting for the fireflies to come. For some reason we simply knew they would. Desert twilight lasts for about 90 minutes most of the time. The mountains do strange things with the setting light, it twists it and turns it and makes every red and purple. The world settles and everything becomes rosy. When people speak about looking at the world through rose colored glasses, I think this is what they mean. My brother and I sat there, the world turning red and rosy around us, waiting for the fireflies to come.

We wanted to see the flash of light.

“Hey, what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

My brother pointed and I saw something, a shadow of sorts in the creosote. I squinted at it and shrugged. “Dunno … “

The world faded slightly, the reds turning umber and purple. The twilight around us stretching and moving as it so often did. There was only the sound of the soft evening breeze through the spindly, half-dry leaves of creosote. The world moved slightly, but it was not something we were aware of at the time. The spin of the world on its axis. The slow change and drone of time. This passing that no child is ever really aware of.

The red tinted shadow in the brush didn’t move, but it was not the shadow of the brush itself. It was too solid. My brother and I felt no fear at this. It was the desert and we were used to such things. Many people don’t understand the true mystery of the desert. There are shadows that are more alive than the trees there. You can hike for a month in the desert and never see so much as a lizard, then one day the whole world wakes up and is teeming with birds, wolves, javelina, reptiles, rodents and insects. It is not something that is questioned. It is something that simply is. So, this solid shadowy life did not faze us.

The world was very red by this point. I remember thinking that there wasn’t much movement despite the wind. I could feel the wind on my face. It didn’t cool me; it just moved the air around me. But I felt, at the same time, that things were very still. Or maybe I was simply very still.

It was still twilight and we were still waiting for fireflies; I with the net and my brother with the jar. We sat through that twilight almost silently. We did that a lot. Sometimes I wonder if we were more aware of things than we let on. That we just wanted a time to reflect on life and get away from the angry face that haunted us when we did not fade away into the desert.

I think maybe we were the shadows in the desert.

We were waiting as we turned into red tinted shadows a part of the desert and still separate. We sat, surrounded by a brittle wall that kept the desert in just as much as it kept it out. Sometimes we would speak as we waited, speak about nothing and everything. Life as we knew it then was simple. Black, white and idealistic. We trusted in things that no one really should ever trust in.

Most of all we trusted in the desert. We trusted in that solid shadow in the distance and the smell of dust. We knew things would be the same when we got home and eventually our brittle walls would crumble and we would have to rebuild them until we no longer wanted to. We knew these things without knowing them, somewhere, in the back of our heads. Somewhere we wanted to think that time didn’t matter. But it did.

So we sat, waiting for the fireflies that would never come.

Posted by Utopia at November 22, 2006 08:33 AM

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Posted by: sid at November 22, 2006 11:37 AM

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