Читать книгу 50 Miles - Sheryl St. Germain - Страница 14

Fireflies

When Gray was in junior high we lived in Iowa where he stayed with me in the summers, and with his dad, in Dallas, for the school year. I would feel sad when the fireflies came in August because I knew it was almost time for him to return to his father’s. We had a ritual of going out to watch fireflies the evening before he had to leave.

One August evening in those years we took our last walk of the summer to the park near our house. Gray ran around the open field in the park’s center, buoyed by an energy my body had long forgotten, sweat shining on his forehead like a kind of body-light in the setting sun. He ran to the merry-go-round and pushed it in faster and faster circles.

“Hey mom, look at this!” he yelled, hanging on to the side railings in a casual kind of way, to show that he could handle the danger, no problem.

He ran from the rails to the slide, then up and down the slide, then back to the merry-go-round in a dizzying performance of young male energy. Two girls watched silently from the edge of the playground. It was beautiful, this display of energy; it was everything I thought of when I thought of youth, yet I couldn’t help but remember his elementary school teachers complaining endlessly of this very vigor.

Every now and then he’d look over to make sure I was watching, and I’d smile. I didn’t want him to know how torn I was at his leaving, didn’t want him to feel the dark thing already growing in my throat like some new infection.

I blinked back my grief, then suddenly it was really dusk and the whole field, every inch of it, came alive with the glowing bodies of thousands of fireflies, blinking their own spirit, searching for something kindred. Their light felt like a blessing, a consolation, a reminder of how beautiful the earth was, and Gray: look at me, look at me, remember, remember this, they seemed to blink. Their flashing lights were a reminder that what makes life beautiful is precisely the fact that it doesn’t last.

The world looked upside down, as if the stars had descended to cover the earth for a time, to touch us with their smallest lights. May none of these be broken, I asked, may they stay whole until their short lives stop, may someone be there, sober and full of human light, watching over their sweet, boundless energy.