Lightnin’ bugs

Tonight, as I was doing a breathing treatment and watching episode 3 of Pure for the third or fourth time, the power went off.  As my luck goes, both batteries for my portable oxygen concentrator were dead and so was my car battery.  Well, damn. No oxygen, no air conditioning, and NO INTERNET! Oh, the humanity!

I placed a quick call to the electric company to report the outage and noticed I only had 21% battery power left on my phone.

Am I going to die tonight?

I called my rescue squad and they were here in ten minutes.  They jumped my battery and followed me to the gas station. (Yes, almost out of gas, too.)

Back at home now, and I have been sitting in the car with it running for an hour or so.  I was reflecting on the recent events when I saw something that calmed and grounded me: lightning bugs. Fireflies. Lots of them. Survivors that have avoided the toxins of summer pesticides to become tiny beacons announcing their presence silently.

Many years ago, my best friend and I laid on the hood of her mom’s car and watched fireflies and talked about heaven, debating what it must look like and where it was. “I think it is beyond the stars”, she said. “I think what we see is a giant window shade with pinholes in it. Those are the stars we see and behind that, is light and heaven.”  “Yeah”, I replied. That’s all I could say.  It was mid-August, a week or so after her birthday and we had smoked her birthday weed and now was staring up at a giant window curtain full of pin holes pondering serious things like heaven and how does that lightning bug know when to flash its butt? Do they have rules about that or take turns flashing?  We reckoned there must be a lightning bug law of flashing among them.

And then I saw a falling star. And another. And the longer we laid there, the more frequent they fell. We stayed there for hours, trying to count them and arguing about the numbers then laughing so loud her mom came out and shushed us.

I fell asleep under those falling stars and lightning bugs, content that heaven is real but not necessarily “up there“.  Heaven is where you are.

My friend has been dead thirty years and I hope she found her heaven beyond the window shade among the stars.

Hug your friends. Make a memory. Charge your batteries.

~K.