Fire flies

Ah summer! No school, and no cold weather. We would roam the neighbor doing what ever we wanted to do. Late in the evening, just before I had to go to bed, the sun would go down and it would begin to get dark. The air would be hot and humid, but a little cooler than the heat of the day. Then the fireflies would come out. When I first saw the fireflies I was afraid they would burn me like hot coals. "No, look Tink!" said James. "I can catch one in my hands, and it doesn't burn!" He demonstrated by quickly grabbing at a firefly.

"Ah, you don't really have one in your hands," I said in disbelief. Then he opened his hands and I saw one fly out of his hands. "Hey, James, how did you do that?" He patiently showed me how to catch a firefly. With a lot of effort I was finally able to catch one by myself. It tickled my hand. "How come they are not hot?" I wanted to know.

"I think it is hot, but just a little bit. They fly around a lot and cool off." We thought it would be a good idea to catch a lot of them and put them in a glass jar. Then we could have a light in our bedroom all night long. It wasn't easy getting more than one firefly in the jar. They wanted to fly out when we opened the lid. We noticed that they didn't glow all the time after we caught them. That night we had the eerie blue-green glow of the fire flies to light the room. Then I quickly fell asleep. To my great disappointment the fireflies were dead in the morning.

The tunnel

I spent a lot of time on the school bus. I made friends with another little boy on the bus, and we would talk a lot, but we never visited one another's house. One day we decided that it would be fun if we had a tunnel that ran from his house to mine. I did not know precisely where he lived, but as soon as I got home I got a shovel and went out to the woods and began digging. I didn't stop to think how long it would take to dig the tunnel, or what I would do with the dirt. I just started digging. But it was hard work, tree roots got in the way, and I made very little progress. After a couple of hours I had to go into the house for dinner. When my brothers heard about my idea, they ridiculed it.

That night it rained. When I came home from school I went back out to the woods to dig some more. I was disappointed that I had dug so little the day before. "Maybe it will go faster after I get through the tree roots," I thought. When I got to the hole I found that it was filled with rainwater. One of my brothers had come with me to see my tunnel. He laughed at the size of the hole, telling me it would take me years and years to get anywhere. It was too wet to dig that day, and for several days after that. By the time the hole was dry I had lost interest in the tunnel.