Dancing Lights

毎年この時期になると、山口県下松くだまつ市では「踊る光」が現れます。わたしもつい先日(2022年5月22日)、今年初めて見てきました。

本日(5月24日)は、「踊る光」について華陵高校で務めていたときに書いた、19年前の英文記事をシェアさせていただきます。「踊る光」の正体は何でしょう。

Something very nice happened to me the other day. I don’t want to tell this to everybody because I want to keep it secret. However, I would like to share this secret only with you.

It happened to me on the night of Thursday, May 22, exactly a week ago. After finishing work at school around 7:45 in the evening, I went home by bicycle. I took the back road which leads to Hanaoka Shopping Street. Maybe you know the area at the bottom of the steep slope past the small bicycle parking lot, where a stream runs. (A stream means “a small river.”) I went down the hill and rode my bike along the stream. It was then that I saw something extraordinary. I saw small lights flying along the stream. They seemed to be blinking, going on and off. The weak lights were also going up and down. I saw lots of them. The small lights seemed to be dancing along the stream. Yes, they were fireflies, or hotaru.

I hadn’t seen fireflies for a couple of years. The last time I saw fireflies was in Suzenji, which is near Ogori, about two years ago. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to see fireflies flying last Thursday night. They were really beautiful. I went home feeling extraordinarily lucky.

Last, I wanted to share with you a haiku poem I wrote after the firefly sighting. It goes:

Fireflies dancing
Going home late at night
Super lucky!!

(This article was first published in Karyo Weekly on May 29, 2003.)