This is the time of year that I like best. Mid-late June, complete with super-long days, warm weather, nights that are still cool, and everything is lush and beautiful. Flowers, grass, trees, the birds and the bees. But most especially I love lightning bugs! I wait impatiently for them to appear every year and it is one of the high points of my summer.

Most people call them fireflies and for many years I called them that, too. It sounds, well, cuter somehow. But we called them lightning bugs when I was a kid in southern New Jersey, and now that my parents and both of my brothers have passed on, it seems more important to me to honor those childhood memories and the simple joys they bring back to me. They are, once again, Lightning Bugs.

I was amazed to learn a few years ago that there are many different subspecies of lightning bugs, and that each one blinks in a different and distinctive pattern in order to attract a mate of it’s own type. There is even one type, synchronous fireflies, found only in two places in the whole world, that can synchronize their flashing light patterns!

The lightning bug is the one of the few insects that I really and truly like, along with stick insects (another childhood favorite) ladybugs, and of course cicadas, which provide a wonderful soundtrack to late summer.

The other night the lightning bugs in our back yard were putting on a spectacular bioluminescent show. My husband and I walked to the darkest part of our yard, way in the back, so we could get the best view. The trees and bushes were lit up with probably millions of them, and the overall effect was one of twinkling Christmas lights. It was mysterious and amazing and somehow seems new every year when I see them again as if for the first time.

My husband got out his iPhone to try and take some photos, and then he was trying to capture them on video. I wandered away a bit and then turned to see what he was doing. And there he was, my sweet husband, optimistically holding his iPhone up to the trees. I thought to myself that he kind of looked like a big lightning bug with his own light flickering, surrounded by all the smaller ones. I thought about what a wonderful husband he is, this unassuming man who I love so much. The man who slept in the car in the hospice parking lot, so he could be near me when my brother was dying. The man who makes me laugh every day with his funny observations and who loves to have friends over for impromptu burgers on the grill. The man who is secure enough to hold my purse for a minute if I need him to. The man who married me and became the world’s best stepdad to my then-14 year old son.

And I realized he was blinking a signal that only I could see, out there in the yard. And I was drawn to him again.