Fireflies

Dallas has fireflies!

If I'd grown up in a place that has fireflies, that sentence ends would a period. But the bit of California I was raised in was and is and ever will be lighting-bug-free. So it is a shock and a delight every time fireflies turn up. And indeed they turn up everywhere: in Illinois and New Hampshire and North Carolina and Iowa, an element of maybe every summer I've spent since I left for college. Yet still I think of fireflies as the exception rather than the norm. Even last night, when I walked Dustin home from the light rail station and halfway home we spotted the first lighting bugs of the season, as if it had never happened before.

Sometimes the things I love about Dallas are not the things unique to Dallas, but the good things I know from somewhere else and am fortunate enough to find again here. I think about them whenever I pass porches with rocking chairs and porch swings, or trees in the front yard with rope swings dangling from high old branches. And I am thankful for every firefly.