World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The campus catalpa offers up its creamy blossoms to the morning, already sultry and humid at nine o’clock in the morning.

When the first glimmer-pop of firefly light appears on a summer night, I always want to call my mother just to say hello.

When my mother is no longer here, I know I will cling to that lovely fragrance

The buntings know the North Star by heart, learn to look for it in their first summer of life, storing this knowledge to use years later when they first learn to migrate. How they must have spent hours gazing at the star during those nestling nights, peeking out from under their mother. What shines so strong holds them steady.

When we see these beacons flashing their lights, they usually have only one or two weeks left to live. Learning this as a child—I could often be found walking slowly around untrimmed lawns, stalling and not quite ready to go inside for dinner—made me melancholy, even in the face of their brilliance. I couldn’t believe something so full of light would be gone so soon.

know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again.

Perhaps I can will it to be true. Perhaps I can keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid, a twig and a few strands of grass tucked inside. And for those unimaginable nights in the future, when I know I’ll miss my mother the most, I will let...

perhaps imagining, for a brief moment, the delicious luxury of what it’s like to be warmed by the sun after a rain.

How I wish I could fold inward and shut down and shake off predators with one touch.

How I wanted a sentinel of my own—to watch out for us if, say, someone in a windowless van followed us home. That was the big fear pushed on us in the mid-eighties: the take a bite out of crime slogan from the ubiquitous McGruff the Crime Dog already interrupted our cartoons on every major channel, and could be spotted on billboards along the interstate.

And bags of potato chips and Super Friends or Scooby-Doo on the television.

And to lose them would be would be no small disaster—we’d lose their unique connections to eighty-five million years of evolutionary history. I know that’s a sobering thought. But! We have to remember that in a time of so many extinctions, to find fourteen (fourteen!) new species of frog is a small ray of hope. Frogs are the great bioindicators of this planet—meaning the health of dancing frogs is indicative of the health of the biosphere itself. That’s a bit of promising news to come out of one of the most gorgeous places on earth, where the cool streams flow along the base of the Ghat mountain range in southwestern India.

And for now, I’m just so tickled to know these little ones exist, foot-flagging on a shade-cooled rock, tapping their way together toward a rush of pebble, water, wind.

Way down deep, in the perpetual electric night of the water column—a place where sunlight doesn’t register time or silver filament—the vampire squid glides in search of a meal of marine snow.

Only one man didn’t wince when I said the word inflorescence. In fact, this man wanted to know more. He wanted to see a corpse flower for himself. He didn’t seem fazed when I reminded him of the odor. I couldn’t believe my luck when, a few months later, over what had become our near-weekly dinner date, this handsome, green-eyed man put his fork down and said he wanted to take a road trip with me the next time a corpse flower bloomed. That it didn’t matter where it was. I knew he wasn’t joking when he said he’d go anywhere with me, and that he meant it. I’d met my match.

His serious face told me–through all the electric and fragrant greens, the spray and the shine of the wild bursts of fruit, the messy blood-red days and the stench and the stink too—this finally was a man who’d never flinch, never leave my side when things were messy, or if he was introduced to something new. This was a man who’d be happy when I bloomed.

In my mother’s homeland of the Philippines, whale sharks occupy a prominent place in folklore.

so no need to worry. Of course I worried.

perhaps you could try a little tranquility, find a little tenderness in your quiet. Who knows what feathered gifts await?

For the daily tragedies, I try to do what I can to help—donate money, gather bathroom supplies—but my heart longs for a place of tenderness. Where people offer each other, offer strangers, a fresh globe of fruit. Sure thing, sweetheart, I tell him as I hoist a melon on the counter. Let’s go back to Foda soon. We are all overdue for a visit.

Once, two researchers at the Seattle Aquarium conducted a test to see if octopuses could tell humans apart. Each day they more frequently approached their eight resident octopuses, with one scientist holding a bristled stick behind his back, to poke the octopuses with, and the other holding food. The researchers wore the same blue jumpers and were about the same height, and they also changed which side of the tank they approached, but in less than a week, the octopuses could distinguish them correctly. One even aimed its siphon at the researcher with the stick and squirted water at him, and the rest of the octopuses would start moving with something like glee toward the one holding food.

My eldest started to panic—Why is it not moving, Mommy? Let’s put it back. It’s probably so scared! We tried to revive it in the water, but its lavender body floated in the incoming tide, spectral against the white marble that lined the beach.

There had been too much stress, too many hands holding it out of the water; it was all just too much for that creature who prefers solitary senescence, the slow and steady stage of not moving much at all and just taking in the world and water around them. Everyone grew quiet. Some students slipped away to gather up their towels and leave.

My son never ate an octo...

Surely the hawks or the Florida heat would soon pierce the thin belly of their bird. Dad gripped the wheel tighter, as if trying to catch his heavy sobs into the dark center of his hands, and suddenly, there it was—the shriek they knew so well, the tiny white Mohawk, the splendid flash of yellow and gray—on the tip-top of the persimmon tree. Even the fruit was unharmed by his tender claws. Dad scooped Chico up into the boat of a black umbrella, and my parents cooed over their wild luck. Later that night they clipped the cockatiel’s wings in the kitchen sink. My parents slept sound that night after walking miles around their neighborhood lake, their bed made extra soft and so full of hope. As Emily Dickinson once wrote, hope is the thing with feathers.

I love this book. 5 stars already

The neon pink of a dragon fruit screams summertime, pop music, sunglasses balanced on the top of my head, weather too warm for socks. It means vintage MTV and stretchy spheres of Bubble Yum popped and snapped in the back rows of a school bus. It’s electrocution. It’s the shade of lipstick I was never allowed to wear, full of pearl powder and unpronounceable chemicals, the shade worn by Boy George, Whitney Houston, and various members of Duran Duran on the album covers I cherished most.

This is the fruit for a time of year when the sun and all its gallop don’t merely feel as though they have nudged us from a static winter, but into a fully alive, roaring season—when everything you touch feels like it could give you a blister and a bit of wild burn.

Boys in their late twenties would cruise us over at UDF (United Dairy Farmers, how Midwestern), the convenience store closest to the freshman honors dorm.

see young coeds lining the sidewalks near campus on their way to dance. And dance and dance, even in the middle of the week, as I once did. I say a silent prayer for them all to come back safe to their nests late at night, again and again. So far, every one of them has come home. When I see groups of young women out together, I can’t help but silently offer something like prayer for them: Tonight, let them tuck their legs under safe covers, let their parents breathe steady in their own bedrooms and receive no panicked late-night phone calls.

Under a brilliant moon, and unbeknownst to us, the darkened world silvers and shimmers from pink and ebony wings, a small thunder. We can’t possibly hear such an astonishing wind while we try to keep in step with our small dances on this earth. But we should try. We should try.

Who aren’t afraid to sway and shake to music whenever they encounter it—and dance to music no one else hears but them. And so, I ask: When is the last time you danced like a superb bird of paradise? I mean, when was the last time you really cut a rug, and did you mosh, bust a move, cavort, frisk, frolic, skip, prance, romp, gambol, jig, bound, leap, jump, spring, bob, hop, trip, or bounce? Did you dance in the streets? Were you footloose and fancy free? Did you get into a groove, give it a whirl, keep someone on their toes or sweep them off their feet? If it’s just you, never fear. It might take two to tango, but it only takes one to strut their stuff and shake their tail feathers, even a little bit.

These newts are one of the only amphibians to contain a ferromagnetic mineral in their bodies, and that, combined with their incredible capacity to memorize sun- and starlight patterns to return to their original pond waters, make them an animal on par with salmon for their excellent homing capabilities. What’s particularly amazing is that in its lifetime—thanks to its innate magnetic compass—a newt usually doesn’t stray farther than just over a mile from its original pond, staying within the range of about eighteen football fields.

Boom, I want to tell the people at Siesta Key, whom I see dumping empty potato chip bags into the shrubs of sea grapes from my blanket on the beach.

Don’t you see? We are all connected. Boom.

There’s a spot over Lake Superior where migrating butterflies veer sharply. No one understood why they made such a quick turn at that specific place until a geologist finally made the connection: a mountain rose out of the water in that exact location thousands of years ago. These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they’ve never seen, sound waves breaking just so, and fly out of the way. How did they pass on this knowledge of the invisible? Does this message transmit through the song they sing to themselves on their first wild nights, spinning inside a chrysalis? Or in the music kissed down their backs as they crack themselves open to the morning sun? Does milkweed whisper instructions to them as it scatters in the meadow?

a reminder of something long gone and crumbled, like that mountain in Lake Superior. Perhaps, in the distant future, a sound that resembles my voice will still haunt my great-great-great-great-great-grandchild—a sound she can’t quite place, can’t quite name.

even wings can’t guarantee a smooth flight.

Quite a view while night swimming—in the lit-up pool, skim the floor and rotate till your belly faces the surface and try to hold your breath: When do you start to float up? See the night sky and all its stars from your goggles.

I knew that when the last snowmelt ran down the street and the spring peepers began their song, the promise of warmth on my skin was pressing near.

As i read this, the snow has just melted into mud, it is night and its the second night i have heard the frogs sing ther peeping song.

Agape—which, someone once told me, is the Greek word for the highest, purest form of love.

A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whip-poor-wills;

This is how i learn whippoorwills are birds! Wow.

the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness. Listen: Boom. Can you hear that? The cassowary is still trying to tell us something. Boom. Did you see that? A single firefly is, too. Such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn—a shift and a swing and a switch—toward cherishing this magnificent and wondrous planet. Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat—your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.

I’ve said that my books are born of love and wonder, and I hope what you have in your hands now is perhaps the most crystalline example yet.