If you grew up in a city, it was common for mothers to warn children that they had to return home once the first street lamps flickered on. On late summer evenings kids playing freeze tag or rundown would see the first glimmers of incandescence flickered on, drop whatever it was they were doing and book it home to avoid a parent’s wrath.
This summer, fireflies are became my street lamp. They warn me when it’s time to retire, a flickering coda to the end of weary days that could stretch forever if it weren’t for nature’s nightlights.
In the long evenings I sit on my front porch patio couch, maybe smoke a cubanito and or sip bourbon in a glencairn glass. The crows are first to arrive, flying in split wing formation in the half dozens. Swallows swoop in behind, picking off gnats and mosquitoes above the treeline and electric wires.
At sunset, when the sky fades purple to navy, brown bats emerge from the steeple of a nearby church and skim the peaks of the building-sized pine trees planted in the yard of a large single-family property across the street from our house before heading west, toward the nearby Jones Falls river that slices through Baltimore.
They hunt for dinner in peace there, safely away from the rest of us.
Finally the fireflies arrive, sprinkled through my and my neighbors’ front yards. Crickets and tree frogs providing musical accompaniment for the light show. My cigar is usually burnt to a stub by then, my whiskey gone, so I head to bed.
This is how I remember time. The idea of a Wednesday is lost on me now. Instead, I remember the day two bullfrogs sumo wrestled each other for a place of dominance over my in-laws coy pond up in the northern county. They grappled with their tiny front legs, pushed with their powerful rear haunches and croaked and ground each other down fighting for leverage, until, tired, they bounced away to regain energy for a second round.
June was the month we visited my uncle’s vacation house on the Choptank River, located just east of Easton. There are bald eagles there. We spot them with binoculars when they emerge from the tall pines down river. Their calls are ear-splitting, the natural equivalent of running a pencil eraser over a linoleum desktop. They wake up before dawn breaks and wail while we’re still curled in bed trying to sleep.
In March we adopted two tuxedo cats, a pair of brothers named Tango and Cash. They hid under the couch in our entertainment room for a month, moving only by the cover of night to feed. They’ve since learned to assert themselves. Tango has explored the rest of the house, laying claim to the basement, while Cash continues to rule the upstairs entertainment room. They both fight for Sam’s affection, which helps me understand them more.
Our pink and scarlet roses bloomed again, and we harvested peas Sam planted earlier. We picked the perennial lavender and the early basil. Summer arrived with cayenne peppers, fresh tomatoes, purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, which the local goldfinch population fought over. From our dill we captured three black swallowtail caterpillars and raised them in an aquarium, then later pulled a monarch caterpillar off the front yard milkweed. They ate, spewed frass then hibernated in chrysalis.
On nights with fireflies we sometimes drink with our new friends from the West Coast, who moved into the neighboring row house in the first days of pandemic. They are Californians, more importantly Los Angelenos, which is welcome. I’ve spent important days in Los Angeles, eating tacos, walking beaches in Santa Monica and Huntington, bathing in the warmth of Pacific Ocean sunsets. It’s good to know people familiar with those experiences.
We’d love to show them our neighborhood, but we haven’t been to a bar or restaurant since March. We spent that last night on the Avenue, the main thoroughfare of shops and restaurants located in our neighborhood of Hampden. We drank margaritas and ate tacos at Golden West, a southwestern themed restaurant, then watched Jeopardy and drank whiskey with the regulars at our favorite dive bar Frazier’s before finishing with a nightcap at Eightbar, a cozy tavern space located in the back of Atomic Books store.
I remember our potential future hinted at but not fully realized, as if everyone knew the Germans had crossed the Maginot Line but we’re still waiting for better news while we drank up all the good champagne. At Eightbar we discussed the implications of catching a new flu. We’d survive, some thought, but a local teacher who was drinking his beer wearing blue rubber gloves warned us that his wife, who worked in medical administration, had already prepared him that rough days were ahead.
Still we sat there together, regulars and friends, shoulders aligned until 9 p.m. hit, closing time for the bookstore bar.
Then Benn, Atomic Book’s co-owner, shouted last call and we all walked out into the night.
————————————————————————————————-
We share the east wall with our Los Angelenos friends. We share our west wall with another neighbor, a life-long neighborhood resident, a sweet but spacey woman who lives by herself. She’s dedicated to her Methodist church, frightened of cats, uses a weed wacker to cut her lawn and is a bit of a hoarder. We’d say hello to her leaving the house or while finishing work in the backyard, forgetting how she can trap you in long conversations that wander into the decades of her past. We just have to nod and smile and slowly escape.
Stricken with arthritis in her legs, the pandemic pushed back her regular inpatient therapy which was considered non-essential. Her walking became hampered almost immediately. We helped carry groceries and other heavy items for her, but she otherwise attempted to retain her independence despite her condition. One morning, she tripped and fell right next to her car, smashing her face and nose into the asphalt. We found her sprawled on the curb covered in blood.
Medics were called, and weary looking EMTs arrived and loaded her into an ambulance. She visited the emergency room, was released and moved in with a local relative, fell again, returned to the emergency room, then finally wound up in a nursing home for a period of extended treatment and rehabilitation.
She was tested for the virus toward the end of her nursing home stay, but was released before she was given the results. Inevitably she received a positive diagnosis, and was forced to quarantine for two weeks. We cut her lawn and pruned her hedges during that time, and neighbors and her church left food at her front door. We didn’t see her for seventeen days.
During quarantine she stopped drinking liquids and her arthritis flared up again. She struggled to breathe, and the isolation strained her already delicate mental state. When church parishioners visited her she didn’t respond, so they called emergency services. Police arrived, then more EMTS and then firefighters. A ladder truck was used to pull her from her home. Large men in blue polos and strong work pants carried her on an orange plastic tarp and placed her in an ambulance, her mask-covered face framed by her delicate gray hair. She hasn’t been home since.
——————–
On a separate evening, I sat alone on my porch and sipped whiskey and waited for the birds and bats. As the sun set, to the north of me I could hear a drum line practicing cadences. They were out of sight but the rhythms were alive, echoing off houses and through the river valley. Over and over, kicking it up and then hovering down and then pounding it back again.
The cadences were human and ancient, and welcome on a summer’s night.
Then the sun set and the fireflies flickered on. I finished my drink and headed to bed, knowing I’d just wake up again tomorrow.
