Sometimes the old adage: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’ applies to many things. Not just possessions of our youth that seem to vanish without trace or explanation one day, but many other things too, and many of them far, far more important.

When I was younger, I used to have a really cool glow-in-the-dark Frisbee that I liked to toss around in the early evenings, when the fireflies would start to come out.

That Frisbee is long-gone, and I have no idea how or when that happened, and the couple of times I’ve briefly had it in my head to try and replace it, I’ve only ever come across cheap, crappy knockoffs.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it was always just a cheap, plastic toy. Still, those memories about it also made me realise that there was a much bigger context at play, when I asked myself the question: Never mind the Frisbee, when was the last time you actually saw a firefly? The scary part is that I had no answer for that. In all honesty, I don’t think I had seen so much as a single firefly since some time in the late Eighties.

Curiosity piqued, and a couple of hours of google-fu later, I found out that I was far from the only one, who had noticed such things. Apparently, fireflies have been gradually disappearing for well over two decades, and the biggest culprit is apparently, yet again, the living embodiment of those old Joni Mitchell lyrics about paving over paradise to put up a parking lot.

(Although newer data, of course, blames it on the current bugbear-du-jour and cause-célèbre of Global Warming)

Yet, after all of this, on the evening of 25 April 2017, I was once again down in St. Augustine, FL visiting a friend. We drove into town for dinner while it was still light, and then back to his place just west of town a little bit after dark. As I got out of the car to close the driveway gate behind us, I once again saw several of those yellow-green flashes…