Fireflies

When I was a child in Oklahoma, in the early 1950's, I remember those hot summer nights chasing fireflies, or "lightning bugs", as we called them. We had no streetlights on our street and so the little glowing bugs lit up against the darkness "like diamonds in the sky". We would catch them in a mason jar, enjoy adding to them for awhile, and then when our moms called us to come in, taking the lids off our jars and letting them go back into their magical night. The fireflies came almost every night during the summer. Then we moved to California for a year, and wondered why we never saw any lightning bugs in California. When we moved back to Oklahoma, same small town, there were no fireflies in our new neighborhood either. Don't know if it was something about the different neighborhood locations, or... I do remember on several occasions DDT being sprayed from a truck driving slowly down our street (!). That certainly could do it. But I miss the excitement of those firefly nights! Makes me sad that my kids never got to experience that, and certainly not my grandchildren.Where did they go? What else is missing?