The Best Thing in a Long Time

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A wonderful thing happened last night, arguably the best thing that has happened in a very long time. Although it didn’t begin out that way.

The story starts around 10 pm. I was sitting on the couch after my shower, a towel in my hair, talking to John before bed, when the phone rang. A call at that hour, and from Roma (John’s Dad’s Wife) meant one of two things: either she was lying on the floor and could not get up, or there were animals out.

“The goats are all out on the road. A car of people saw them and knocked on my door.”

Crap.

Goat doing what they should be doing: eating a honey locust. Ours decided to go on a walk-about instead.

The goats have been getting out lately. As John’s sister later explained, these great escapes usually happen in spurts. This spurt has been going on for almost two weeks now—with the whole mess of them (now about 70 total, with kids), vanishing on a semi-frequent basis.

So last night, when the Roma rang, I quickly made some other calls.

“The goats are out on the road,” I told my stepson Jacob, who had just been visiting and perhaps could turn around and head back to the farm. I called Jeff and Andrea, my brother and sister-in-law, too, who live down the road.

We all sprang into action. It was a moonless night, dark and starry, and by the time we arrived, Jeff and John’s sister Andrea had already located the escapees. The herd had moved off the road and back onto the farm, out of immediate danger of cars. Lucky break.

The group swirled like a tightly packed school of fish, the tallest and biggest in front, the small kids in the back, ending up near the buck’s pen. Our buck is a hefty and ornery Kiko named Ben, who was truly excited by this sudden nighttime visit from the ladies

Jacob moving Ben the Buck

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We could get the goats into Ben’s pen and move him somewhere smaller, but some maneuvering had to happen. Just in time, my stepson Jacob, a hefty and sometimes ornery Human who had gone head to head with Ben before (ask me when you see me about that story) arrived. It was mano a mano, Man against Goat, as Jacob caught the buck by his horns and frog marched him to his new pen, with Jeff slapping the goat’s butt and yelling “yah!” like he was a western cowboy on a cattle drive.

With the Buck and Does finally put away, the fence turned on high, we were finally, finally done for the evening. I profusely thanked our family for their attendance—what would we have done without them? I asked aloud. I am so grateful they live nearby.

Which, while wonderful in and of itself, wasn’t the best thing ever. That was what happened next.

Alone in the darkness, family members departed and goats quiet in their old pen, we walked for a few minutes, John hobbling along on his peg leg (did I tell you he broke his heel??) as we paused to look at the stars. And that’s when we saw it. Right on the road, near the truck and over a field of soybeans: hundreds of fireflies flickering in the darkness. It was a dance of light that made us both gasp.

“They’re back!” I shout-whispered to the night.

For the past many years, there have been fewer and fewer fireflies—a situation I have found heartbreaking. Night after night, year after year, I’d try to ignore these sparks missing from the landscape. It felt like a lost love, the absence of a friend I had taken for granted who quietly vanished from your life.

Light pollution, one neighbor explained. Pesticides, John theorized. The population of fireflies had been decimated, news articles said, and no one really knew why.

Regardless of the reason, it was a blow, the kind that was too deep, too visceral, to really take in. We have destroyed so much on this planet, so many rivers polluted and species gone. But lightning bugs??

They meant childhood, summertime, that kid-like sense of pure wonder and awe. For some reason, this one small loss in the midst of so much change and destruction felt to me like the icing on the cake, the penultimate example of all humans have done wrong.

But then there they were twinkling in the darkness.

Who knows if it is a permanent switch, if our grandkids will actually be able to experience the awe of watching the day slip into night as the fireflies dance.

But for me the sight felt a lot like hope. A reminder that all is not lost, and that the world continues on—even healing itself at times—in the midst of chaos.

Welcome back, lightning bugs. I hope you come again, soon.

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Thanks to the Iowa Writers Collaborative for including me in the ranks. Check out the Sunday Round up for links to more than 70 professional writers in the state.