I think the song is about him as a boy catching fireflies on the Fourth of July in Tilamook State Forest while visiting his mother in Oregon one summer. The Tilamook Burn was the site of a series of wildfires that ravaged that part of Oregon from 1933 to 1951 and, after the area rebounded, was renamed the Tilamook State Forest in 1973.
Not sure if anyone has ever done this, but we used to catch live fireflies in mason jars or our cupped hands as a kid. While marveling at their bio-luminescence, those captured insects wouldn't live long and I imagine it was the same for Sufjan who later wrote this song as an elegy to those beautifully doomed creatures whose memory has been likened here to that of his dying mother.
This song really haunts me as it seems to capture a child's momentary contemplation of the death of all things and the briefness an fragility of life itself.
I think the song is about him as a boy catching fireflies on the Fourth of July in Tilamook State Forest while visiting his mother in Oregon one summer. The Tilamook Burn was the site of a series of wildfires that ravaged that part of Oregon from 1933 to 1951 and, after the area rebounded, was renamed the Tilamook State Forest in 1973.
Not sure if anyone has ever done this, but we used to catch live fireflies in mason jars or our cupped hands as a kid. While marveling at their bio-luminescence, those captured insects wouldn't live long and I imagine it was the same for Sufjan who later wrote this song as an elegy to those beautifully doomed creatures whose memory has been likened here to that of his dying mother.
This song really haunts me as it seems to capture a child's momentary contemplation of the death of all things and the briefness an fragility of life itself.