Lightening Bugs

For the past two nights I have seen lightening bugs along a nearby ditch. I turned to look for traffic and there were the glittering bugs. Lightening bugs evoke the childhood years I spent in the mountains of North Carolina  Were there a contest for favorite memories the evenings spent outside in the Weyehutta Valley in Jackson County N.C. would win by a landslide.
Our family rented a small, white house tucked close against the bottom of the slope of an old, worn down mountain. Our landlord had a large run-down barn on the property. A fence ran behind our house at the place where the slope began the rise that led to the top of the mountain. On the other side of the fence a wide swath of land had been forested. The earth was red clay, scattered with rocks and patches of rough, survival grasses. A trail crisscrossed  back and forth on itself ending further up the slope where the forest began.
The sweetest, cold spring water flowed from that mountain and into our home. I have not experienced delicious water again since that time in my life.
Lightening bugs always send me hurtling back to the days spent in the little house in the valley. Green grass grew thick and plentiful in our front yard. A plowed field of red clay soil was adjacent to our house. When I close my eyes and travel back to the twilight evenings spent in our yard I immediately inhale the intoxicating smell of sweet grass, earthy soil and the water flowing in the creek located between our home and the paved road. I believe I knew intuitively that I would return many times, in the years to come, to those magical evenings. 
Lightening bugs blinked and drifted through the darkening evening. It seemed there were hundreds of them. We caught them in mason jars releasing them later to join their kind. At some point the lightening bugs simply vanished to reappear the next night.
Lightening bugs, flowering honeysuckle, sweet grasses, pungent soil and a faint smell of manure from the nearby barn combined to create an entire world in my heart and mind. Within that world I hear the sound of children laughing and calling out insults as a game of touch football became challenging. Nature provided the sound of the cicadas, various birds calling out to one another, small frogs and larger bullfrogs harmonizing as the lights of home appeared in the window and our names were called for supper.
Later I would lie in my bed listening to the silence of the night. There was no air conditioning. Our windows were open with only the screens between us and the outside world. Light breezes brought the outside inside as we drifted off to sleep.
It will be fine with me if heaven is a mountain valley formed from my memories just for me for eternity.