Achieving the Idyllic Life by Firefly Light

The dark side of the bedroom lit up for an instant by a yellow flashing light. The light looked something like the neon version of a Christmas light, but much more charming because of its fleeting nature. The fireflies captured by the boy a few hours ago have just begun to put on a show, as though they have accepted their captivity. The Mason jar that looks like a prison to them looks much more like something else to me. It looks like a by-gone era. It looks like an idyllic life.

I traveled back in time yesterday. I can’t be certain how long, because there seems to have been a bit of indecision on time’s part. Fifty years? Seventy? Ninety? Several long ago decades have blurred together to take me to the place I am at now. Not only have I gone back in time, but I have found myself in The Deep South.

People here have a twang to their voices that is almost natural to me as a county sort of sound, but has been muted within me by years of living in a mixed culture. Maybe it is my ancestor’s southern genes that speak to me when I hear the accents, and subsequently feel them in my own throat. Maybe it is that my past lives were lived here, and my past mouths formed the same sounds.

Maybe it is only that today I ate hoecakes with an enormous scoop of barbecue on top, collard greens steeped in pot liquor, and sweet pickled cucumbers and onions. Therefore all of that southern food is infiltrating my mind while being digested.

Maybe it is only that I am a bit of a chameleon. Doesn’t matter, the sound is idyllic to me. We are all searching, whether directly or indirectly, for the idyllic life. Or we are simply searching for what the idyllic life means to us. I’m nearly thirty-three and I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m getting closer. I have this sinking feeling only chameleons can find the idyllic.

So today, during my time travel to my grandmother’s house, I wondered at the edge of bluffs. I was looking for Queen Anne’s lace, admiring rabbit tobacco, and collecting polly-wanna seeds. This is the sort of thing a person does when they do not have internet, or rather, when they can only grasp at a bit of a signal somewhere near a cable pole, but the signal goes in and out, while the laptop holding human is baked in the afternoon sun. Why would anyone do that when they could be collecting Queen Anne’s lace and listening to mocking birds sing? My eyes were peeled for baby rabbits, in-between gazing at fat white clouds blowing across the summer sky.

After all of this very important work was done, I picked up a romance novel off of one of many bookshelves. An entire shelf was devoted to romance novels of the Amish variety. I did not know it, but such things exist. The books take place in an Amish village, and I think the common theme is that some nice young woman is widowed, and then the charming well put together single Amish man steps in, and the romance begins. It is romance without anything untoward. It is romance in the old-fashioned sense—in the idyllic sense.

I almost got absorbed in it, but I didn’t, because then I remembered that I am a writer. Any void in my emotional needs does not need be soothed by reading someone else’s story. My emotional needs are written out as fiction, saved as a few pages at random somewhere in my laptop, and forgotten once the need has been filled. People say that you can travel anywhere in a book, but think what can be done if you write it? We create our own version of reality simply by perceiving it, but creative people take it a step further—we satisfy our own needs, creating the idyllic life in text. Anything can happen in fiction, after all.

So, during a bit of time travel, what does a writer do on a night like this? We wait until after dark, when everyone else is in bed, and we stare at the blank screen of an internet-less laptop. We begin to write. We hear the clocks tick, then chime away on the hour. Each clock throughout the house is out of sync; each clock is marching to the beat of its own drum. Trains whistle in the distance. A far off streetlight casts a vague bit of gold into the window.

A certain wild energy that is always charging through the brain has quieted because of the time travel. The distracting cellphone is no longer so useful, or appealing. We writers think of something we need, and then we write it into existence. It need not exist outside of words for it to soothe the mind and fix something that is broken. It does not need to actually exist to make life all the more idyllic. Being a writer is to be the greatest of chameleons.

Well, enough about that, I have some writing to do by firefly light.

Don’t you?