The day I saw my first fireflies was also the day that we drove through the worst thunderstorm I had ever encountered. We had driven down to Cedar Rapids to get a bite to eat. The radio was issuing periodic weather warnings for counties north of us, but we didn’t pay too much attention. That is, until we noticed the sky turning black and looming a little closer than it had on the drive down. The only thought was to get somewhere safe, and the only safe place we knew was the hotel — twenty minutes north of us, dead into that black sky.
We could see lightning bolts here and there at first, then in constantly flickering sheets. The rain started on the windshield in fat, deliberate drops, which quickly became cascades then sheets of water that drowned out the wipers. Martin slowed to match the pace of a semi-truck in front of us with its four-way flashers going so that he wouldn’t lose the road. The sky turned from black to glassy green (a sure sign of a tornado, I thought), and the lightning showed no signs of abating. Thunderclaps mixed with the rain and hail pounding against the car. The emergency weather broadcast system interrupted classic rock to remind us of the counties with tornado and flash flood warnings, listing the one we were in every time. We spoke in tight voices only when necessary.
Was it only thirty minutes? Clocks certainly don’t measure time like the pulse of adrenaline-spiked blood. The steady seconds paced off the storm, ignoring our shallow breaths and pounding hearts. Really, only thirty minutes before the sky shifted from green to light gray and then to hazy blue. We arrived at the hotel, unsettled but intact. Water rushed from the soy fields down the ditches and spilled over the road. The rain lingered and gloated its soggy triumph in the storm’s wake.
The plan was to leave the hotel again for an informal gathering with our friends before their wedding. The thought of getting on the road again was a little intimidating, so we decided to ask the front desk clerk for advice.
“That wasn’t even a bad storm!” she replied. “If it had been really bad, I would have gathered everyone out here in the lobby. You won’t have any problem.”
Not a bad storm? I had brought out prayers I hadn’t said since I was a child and that was not a bad storm? I politely thanked God for getting me through the not-bad storm, and vowed never to move to the Midwest.
By the time we had to leave again, we had calmed our nerves and the rain had stopped entirely. A sliver of sunset made its way over the cornfields that line most roads in Iowa. The sun was catching the moisture on the top of the corn in the prettiest way. Except that light doesn’t reflect like that, and certainly not with a green-yellow bioluminescence stretching away in every direction.
The fireflies had come out in full force, playing around what seemed like every cornstalk in the field. It crossed my mind that a person could watch fireflies and begin to believe in fairies and fairyland, even if the romance of a twilight cornfield may be lost on the locals. They danced and winked us into town that night, and soothed us just a little more with their entirely explicable magic.
On the way home from the gathering, around 1:30 a.m., I almost ran over a gaze of raccoons. But that is an unremarkable story.