Luminous By Kylee George
The first house we lived in was a small one story outfit with space in both the front and back to play. The
backyard was spotted with patches of red dirt between the blades of bermuda grass and outlined by a chain link fence that was taller than me, though not by much. In the front, there were two rows of southern wax myrtle, trimmed into a rectangular prismatic shape that lined the sidewalk to the front door and our driveway. One of these hedges bore hard and round berries that once, at the age of five, left to my own devices while my mother cleaned the garage, I decided to collect and swallow. A call to poison control was eventually made and I spent the rest of the day lying on the couch, sorry for my attempt at foraging.
As a young and adventurous child, much of my world was made up of the front and back yards of this
house. This was the place I learned to climb trees especially fast without my shoes on, where I practiced dribbling soccer balls up and down the street (also often barefoot, much to the chagrin of my mother), and where I had many unfortunate experiments with gravity–from falling out of trees to tipping over on a ladder and even once pulling the entire shelving system in the garage down on myself. It was also the place where I first encountered the lightning bug.
Lightning bugs, as my family calls them, are known officially as Lampyridae and are a type of soft-bodied
beetles. There are many different species of Lampyridae that vary in shape and size, sleeping and mating patterns, and location. Not all Lampyridae light up.
Their lights, of course, are what make lightning bugs or fireflies, whatever you like to call them, so recog-
nizable. This is due to a process called bioluminescence–where chemicals in specialized cells in the insect’s abdomen combine with oxygen to create a new, inactive molecule called oxyluciferin. The reaction, caused by an enzyme called luciferase, does two things: first, it combines with a phosphate to form a new compound on the surface of the enzyme. Then, that compound combines with oxygen to form the oxyluciferin and yet another phosphate compound. This is the winning combination–the chemical compound that gives off light in varying shades of white, green, yellow, and even hints of red on occasion.
I don’t remember the first time I saw these little creatures, cousins of the hard-shelled black beetles that I
often found rooting around in the dirt beneath our shrubs, flitting about in our front yard. I do, however, remember lying in the grass there and watching them shine above me, their lights flickering on and off as they worked to 29
