The Lightning Jar

Every morning at seventy-eight, I sort my pills. The **vitamin** C goes in the tiny compartment of the plastic organizer, just like my mother taught me fifty years ago. She'd say, 'Martha, health is the only wealth that truly matters.' I roll my eyes now, but I still sort them just the same.

My grandson Henry came over yesterday, found the old Mason jar on my windowsill. 'What's this, Grandma?' He was eight, with that wonderful curiosity that makes children such delightful little **spy** detectives into our past lives.

'That,' I told him, 'is my lightning jar.'

His eyes widened. I told him how my father, during the Depression, saved that jar from a trash heap, filled it with captured fireflies on summer evenings when we couldn't afford candles. 'We'd catch them just after **lightning** storms,' I remembered aloud, 'when the air still smelled like rain and possibility.'

Henry asked what we'd do with them. 'Nothing much. Just watch them glow while Grandpa told stories about his grandfather, who was a soldier in the Great War. He said light was precious—both the kind you catch and the kind you carry inside.'

Now, as I take my evening vitamin with tea, I understand what he meant. The fireflies are gone. The jar sits empty, but still it holds something: the memory of my father's voice, the way love gets passed down like a lantern through generations. Maybe that's what we become—lightning bugs, glowing briefly, then passing the light to someone else.