Life goes on ... and for women, it’s going backward

The first firefly of the season greeted me last week at dusk, as I watered the hydrangeas sagging from the heat. It lingered for a moment, flashing here and there, impossible to ignore. I am not the species of female the firefly was trying to court, but I was inspired, nonetheless. These bright little bugs fly on the wings of memory for me.

Here in the Midwest, the debate is ongoing: Do we call them fireflies, or are they lightning bugs? When I was a little girl, my mother called them fireflies. My sister Toni, who is five years younger, remembers Mom saying they were lightning bugs. Five years is a long time in a family. Mothers change.

I can still describe the best spot near my childhood home for fireflies. It was near the rusty barrel where Dad burned leaves in the fall, in the patch of grass next to the garage overlooking the overgrown empty lot behind our house. We kids called that lot “the field,” and on summer nights it was aglow with fireflies, a constellation under the stars.

Most of my memories of fireflies are tied to my daughter's childhood. Cait and her best friend, Erica, would chase them at dusk, in the church yard across from our rented home. I can't see a firefly without thinking of those little girls in bare feet and cotton dresses, their dusty toes free of flip-flops and canvass Keds.

When our girls were small and we took the future for granted

On so many evenings, Erica's mother, Nancy, would sit next to me on the front stoop as we watched our girls leap and dart to catch the fireflies they always released. We were both single mothers living long days, but at night we breathed in our daughters' joyful abandonment and saw the promise of their bigger lives.

The workplace was still hard for women but getting better. More men were starting to catch on that we would fight for what was rightfully ours, at home and on the job. Increasingly, Ms. was no longer a pejorative. Abortion rights, while always a target of the right, was the law of the land.

We took things for granted, watching our little girls. We thought they would come of age in a better world than the one that, at every turn, had tried to extinguish the dreams of their mothers.

Memories are like photographs in that their stories continue to evolve. A snapshot in time is just that, a captured moment, but life goes on, adding layers of context to the tale. And so, when fireflies light up around me, I think of my little girl's carefree summer nights – but wait, there's more. Now I also see her little girl, my granddaughter, growing up in a country that is becoming increasingly hostile to her. The promise I saw for her mother is changing into something else. Dusk is a metaphor. Nightfall is a warning.

As I type, we are awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court decision that came on Friday and, as predicted, eliminated the protections of Roe v. Wade. Of our eight young grandchildren, four are girls. I watch their faces light up at the sight of fireflies, their voices full of joy and optimism, and I feel time running out.

State legislatures have turned abortion rights into a contest to see who can inflict the most harm. As the Guttmacher Institute reported, last year 19 states passed 106 abortion restrictions, which is the highest number in a single year since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

Texas, for example, banned all abortions after six weeks, when most women do not yet know they are pregnant. No exception for rape or incest, and as I wrote last September, this is a pro-vigilante law that deputizes citizens to sue any person they think is aiding or abetting an abortion. The bounty for each abortion they out: $10,000.

Now our granddaughters are small; what about their future?

All those little girls, giggling under the night sky. They don't know yet how many extremists in this country will view them as discardable once they are grown, incapable of making decisions for own bodies, their own lives.

I try to imagine what I will say to our granddaughters when they begin to ask, and one day they surely will, “Why do they hate us?” The pivot is everything. My answer must start with the rebuttal.

All this, you might say. All this she gets from seeing a firefly.

Well, yes.

When you care about a child with the force of parental love, you are never offduty. Become a grandparent, and retirement is out of the question. I hadn't expected to feel this way before my first grandchild was born. Now, my life's successes are no longer milestones, but evidence of my training. Duty calls.

Tonight, after another long day, I will sit on the steps of our front porch and count the fireflies fluttering over the hydrangeas. I will hear my daughter's laughter as the moon begins to rise. I will see little girls in cotton dresses, reaching for the sky.

USA TODAY columnist Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, “The Daughters of Erietown,” is a New York Times bestseller. You can reach her at Cschultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @Connieschultz.