Fairies in the Backyard

The other night I picked up our daughters from my mother-in-laws house after a baseball game.  It was after nine o'clock but Emily was wide awake and chattering about the lightening bugs in the backyard.

My mother-in-law mentioned that she has hundreds if not thousands of them in her backyard.  She lives in a townhouse and the land slopes downward from her place.  There is grass and brush and it is lightly wooded with another development behind hers. She led me over to her sliding glass doors leading out to her porch.

The sight before me was magical.  At the bottom where the land sloped all you saw was what looked like miniature flashing lights.  It almost looked like a fairy had sprinkled pixie dust and it was reflecting the moon's rays.  Except, there was no moon that night.


Emily grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the door.

"Come see.  Come see," she said excitedly.

Apparently the best view was from my mother-in-law's couch.  Emily perched on the back of the couch to peer out the window.  Our reflections in the glass made it a little more difficult to see but not according to my two-year old.  She thought it was even more beautiful.

Here is a video from YouTube that is a little like what we saw but there were probably about five times as many lights and it was even more amazing because you were looking down at them.  The little flashing lights are the lightening bugs.



We have been impatiently waiting for the lightening bugs at our house but they seem to have congregated at my mother-in-law's.  Only a few stragglers have shown up, nothing like the masses at her house.