Life Is Like A Field of Fireflies (a la Forest Gump)

You know when something happens that you can’t plan or predict, perhaps something small and seemingly insignificant, but it just makes your day? These are the moments I live for! Firefly moments. Catching a shooting star out of the corner of your eye; bumping into a coworker 3000 miles away from home in the middle of Central Park; or yes, even seeing that “OMG- full on double rainbow all the way across the sky!” . This is the cool stuff of life! I’ve noticed over the years that although I cannot predict when these events will happen, they do happen with great frequency, and it is my intention to start documenting them.


When I was a kid growing up in North Carolina, summer was my all time favorite season, and though there were endless reasons to love summer, mine could be boiled down to just two things: honeysuckle & fireflies. I was pretty much a girly-girl. Well, except for the fact that A) to this day, I still have no idea how to successfully operate a curling iron and B) I was never fortunate enough to own a Barbie. (Btw, thanks be to Gaby for humoring my never-ending fascination with her Barbie Dream House and Barbie shoe collection.) On second thought, maybe owning a single pair of pink Nike Cortez, a bottle of Love’s Baby Soft cologne and an Easy-Bake Oven didn’t exactly qualify me to be a girly-girl, so let’s try this again. How about, I was never much of a tomboy? That’s better. So then as a ‘non-tomboy/wanna be girly-girl’ you can guess that with the exception of having to save a wayward ladybug from an untimely death at the local pool, I was not at all into creepy crawly things. But fireflies… *sigh*…they were different. Fireflies were magic. Staring into an open field at dusk, just waiting to catch a glimpse of the first firefly of the night is still one of my favorite munchkin memories. “I saw one! Did you see it?! Where?! There’s another one!” It never got old. Knowing there was a field full of magic in front of you, and all you had to do was wait for it to be revealed to you?! Priceless!


I feel like as I get older, I am realizing that this is what life is all about-for me: noticing the magic that is already around me and being grateful for it. I’m not too concerned with figuring out the big questions-you know, the how’s and why’s of our existence or what my exact purpose is in life. Instead, I just want to have more firefly moments. :-)