The light we carry: Remembering fireflies through stories
I remember the Caimito tree adjacent to my grandmother’s house in Dapdap Norte. Its roots spilled like a tangled secret into the earth. At dusk, the air around it shimmered with fireflies, as if someone had shaken a jar of stars and set them free. My cousin and I would gather barefoot on the Bermuda grass, breathing in the scent of wet soil and crushed leaves, faces turned upward to the small lights floating among the branches and the night sky.
In hushed tones, Lola Bebe would tell us: “Puy-ananan na sa mga engkanto (That tree is the home of engkantos),” or the supernatural beings older than memory itself. She would warn, “Ayaw tudloa ang kahoy (Don’t point at the tree),” a belief that says if we point at something forbidden, our fingers could be cut off unless we bite them afterward. We nodded solemnly, half-afraid, half-thrilled, because childhood leaves space for both fear and wonder.
On those warm nights, the world felt enchanted, and fireflies seemed to hold it together: glowing threads connecting the living and the unseen, the ordinary and the magical. Their glow was our first lesson in wonder—that even in darkness, the world was alive with hidden stories.
But slowly, almost unnoticed, they began to disappear. First, there were just fewer lights flickering beneath the Caimito. Over the years, none at all. The tree stayed, but the stories started to fade from living memory into quiet, nostalgic recollections. In my search for answers beyond folklore, I read articles from National Geographic and the Firefly Conservation and Research. The causes are numerous and simple: light pollution that confuses fireflies during mating, pesticides that poison larvae before they can glow, the draining of wetlands and rice paddies where they once thrived, and the gradual disappearance of native trees that provided them with sanctuary.
The Caimito itself—once a living monument to myth—was eventually cut down to prevent it from falling during storms. In that act, we protect our home but also lose more than just a tree; We lose a stage where childhood wonder played out, where science and folklore briefly met under the same sky.
I wonder what I will tell children born today when they ask why I talk about summer nights lit up like lantern festivals. What will I say? Will the stories of fireflies and engkantos sound like distant fairy tales, like the Tambaluslos hiding in bamboo groves or the Agta smoking his pipe among Pagatpat trees? Will fireflies become words pressed between the pages of children’s books, their glow surviving only in illustrations?
Yet perhaps this is also the power of stories: to rescue what the eye no longer sees, to remind us that what is lost can live on, not in fields or forests, but in memory and storytelling. When the lights vanish from the trees, I might keep them alive through bedtime stories, whispered warnings not to point at lights in the dark, and folk songs that remember a world where nature itself seemed to be filled with mysteries.
But nostalgia alone cannot bring them back. Our stories must do more than mourn; They must teach respect and responsibility. Talking about fireflies is also talking about rivers that need to stay clean, fields free of poison, and nights that remain dark.
Our myths were never just about magic—they served as guides for living gently with what we don’t fully understand. Sometimes, on hot, memory-filled nights, I still search for that faint, impossible flicker in the dark. Even if my eyes see nothing, my mind fills the night with the ghost of that childhood glow; a reminder that even as they fade, fireflies left us something enduring: the belief that the world was once—and could be again—lit from within.
And perhaps, by sharing these stories with those who come after us, we keep that light alive not just as myth, but as a quiet promise: That wonder, like memory, doesn’t have to die, even when the fireflies have gone.