No More

This evening at twilight, I went outside to watch the fireflies emerge from the grass and the trees' twig-tips. The hayfield to the south of my house is edged with trees and brambles, with a spring and a creek on one side, and a boggy place at one end -- this seems to be a favorite hang-out for fireflies, and I look forward every year to the first half of June, when they peak. They are near but not yet at that peak tonight.

I watched and played with my little camera, to see what it could record of the tiny quick flashes of light they display. There were sounds of frogs, crickets, birds, all with their own rhythms.

I also could hear a tractor, even as the night was washing in. The large farm adjacent to ours grows mostly hay for horses now; the two brothers who own the farm are quite elderly. One of them, I remember, when I first moved here, greeted me at the Post Office, "I know you! You're my neighbor!" He told me how old he was, and was proud to still be working, and fit as man 20 years younger; I told him I was amazed by his vigor and hoped I might be as strong as he when I reach his age. He was pleased, because he knew it was true.

Tonight, I heard the tractor running as dark was coming on, and I could hear my neighbor's son saying loudly over the engine noise, "Stop. Turn it off. Stop - no more! -- I'll do it -- Let me do it!" Then again and again, stop, turn it off! But my proud neighbor was not stopping. He was going to work that field in the hastening dark, until the little light from the twilight sky, fluttering with fireflies, was not enough. Only then, no more.