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Monday, December 7, 2009
 
3:45 AM

Lightning Bugs



Catching lightning bugs was one of my favorite summer activities. I used to get so excited when they would first start to appear in late spring/early summer. Actually, I STILL get excited when that happens. There are few things that better represent the innocense of childhood summers. It was quite common for my friends and I to play outside long past sunset during the summer. We were always having so much fun that we hated to interrupt it just to go eat dinner or sleep. lol So usually, our last outdoor activity of each evening was an hour or so spent chasing lightning bugs. They were plentiful and we had youthful eyes so we could catch them with our bare hands without any problem. Just thinking about those simple summer evenings of my youth fills me with nostalgic longing.



I don't chase lightning buts much anymore because my eyesight is no longer healthy enough for me to be able to see them as well as I could when I was a kid. I've passed my love for catching lightnight bugs onto our children but sadly, they don't get to go out and hunt them much either because we no longer live in a world that is safe enough for children to roam freely outdoors. I feel so sorry for them because they will never know the joyful abandon that I knew as a child. There are predators everywhere, waiting, watching, hoping for an opportunity to take advantage of a child left out in the world unattended so my children, and, all children of their generation are forced to live behind closed doors, always looking over their shoulders. They will never know what it's like to wander through the neighborhood at will with friends. They will never know what it's like to play late-night hide and seek, to spend entire days at the swimming pool, or to ride their bicycles across town for ice cream. They will never know ANY of the precious freedoms that I knew as a child. Of course, they don't realize all that they're missing because a fenced-in lifestyle is all they've ever known. Still, I know what they're missing and realizing just how many beautiful childhood experiences I am unable to pass down to them makes me very sad on their behalf.