The king of the fireflies…

So, that’s it. He’s gone.

Off with the autumn people, pulling down the big red and white tent, packing up his bag and gone to join their cavalcade. And there was I, sure that that whilst he was in this reality there would always be at least one who understood. I would have rode that carousel forever with him too. 

But now he’s gone, moving on with the deep ring of the bell of the train, running with the lightening. Up the rod and into the leaf-blown air - then out on the wind as the weather vane spins and spins and spins…

Just look at my hands you can see it all etched upon my palms. And what’s my fate? Well, turn the handle and see.

Greentown, Illinois. Listen you can almost hear the heat this hot summer’s night, the dandelion’s growing out on the lawn readying for the winemaking. If you need a place to seek refuge, from an unbearable or a boring, then this may be your place. A place of lakes and time machines, of love and murder and accidental deaths, a place of young and old, and fevers, and good home cooking, and passings quiet, and comings stormy, and happiness machines, and aging creeping on us like a long black shadow till - at last - we understand his name. Breathe and smell the warmth of the wind. Drink and taste the sharpness of the wine. Be quick, be quick - It won’t be here forever, we won’t be here forever, he won’t be here forever… or perhaps he will.

Sit with me on the porch swing awhile and reminisce. See the fireflies?

Who knows one day I may give up Bedford Falls and make my way there; perhaps some nights (when the sun has baked the slates upon my roof and I am sticky with the sweat of the retained day) I already have as I move on from sleep to breeze, breeze to tree, tree to firefly, firefly to rabbit, rabbit to the wheel of a passing buggy, wheel to the dust of the road, dust to the garden gate, gate to a blowing leaf, and up on leaf blown wind through my window – GASP - and back to me.

Welcome back me.

Goodnight Ray, been nice. I’ll see you around, we’ll have a beer or two my friend.

“Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.”

Ray Bradbury 1920-2012 and on…