Lacey Johnson
Fireflies lit up the thick space of the sweaty summer night sky. I roamed solitary across the empty grass lawn scooping them into my hands with little effort. I used to collect them in a jar, holes carved into the lid, until I learned, with remorse, that glass was no home for a firefly. So I let their tiny weight imprint in my hand and released them.
Watching my son play, I sometimes mourn how he won’t know the intimacy of a firefly in his palm or being immersed while they dance across the dark. Will he ever know the expansiveness of the soft, severe Nebraska landscape? The burning sunsets. The towering, wispy snow over irrigated fields. The excited feeling of electricity in the air and watching countless storms rolling in from the horizon.
There are things of the place I don’t want him to know. Things that urged me away. But I want him to know me. The latent part of me that comes alive in a windy meadow. The names of native grasses and asters that have cemented in my head. The ancient dance of sandhill cranes, returning in the thousands to root and rest and grow a family on the sandy banks of a braided river. The part of me that has walked on an empty highway in the middle of nothing and no one and felt entirely at home.
Will he ever know a free breath in the swirling winds of the tallgrass prairie? Standing upon a secret dense underworld, where roots entangle farther down than our imaginations can hold. Rarer than an old growth forest. The rolling drift of the sandhills, with red-wing blackbirds sparking across the windshield. A place with a haunting whisper to “let go”.
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In those early moments of life, I was the only place he knew.
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Now, we sit at the bank of the Willamette river on a drizzling winter day. The drumming beat of postpartum malaise evaporating. He’s digging for “clams” in the mud with a stick. Mumbling towards the duck who lurched itself up to the muck for a quick snack.
By two and a half years, he knows how it feels to amble under oak savannah blanketed in moss. Stumbling across nurse logs in search of chanterelles, hiding coyly. He knows herons skimming the river, climbing basalt cliffs, the brief lives of huckleberries, and wild rhodies that pour green all year long.
There are places I remember, I often sing to him at bedtime. Some have indeed changed. Some are lost to me. He will lose places, too, I guess. Maybe to a fire. Or ice. Or something we cannot yet predict. He too will know how a place can live inside of you, even long after it’s gone. Long after he’s grieved its absence.
It will be his own, quiet place. A deep self, that no one else may ever know or understand. Even after he’s long moved away, he’ll know that he matters because he existed in this place. And this place matters because he was here.