Nobody told me that something terrible would certainly happen if I stepped closer.
They simply did not go.
The warning was not theatrical.
It had the practical tone of advice repeated for so many generations that nobody needed to defend it anymore.
Don’t follow strange music after dark.
Don’t interfere with the hawthorn.
Stay near your people.
Stay near the fire.
I found myself looking down the slope anyway.
The land beyond the tree was almost dark now.
Had someone been standing there, I probably would not have seen them.
The woman noticed.
“You still want to go.”
“I want to know.”
“Those are not always the same thing.”
Before I could answer, someone called from the opposite side of the bonfire.
“Another one!”
We turned.
A new flame had appeared beyond the valley.
Then another.
This time I saw the sequence clearly.
One hill burned.
A little later, farther away, another point of fire answered.
Whether every group could actually see the others or whether some had simply chosen the same moment did not matter.
From our hill, the effect was extraordinary.
The landscape was beginning to speak in light.
I walked closer to the edge.
Our fire roared behind me while distant fires pricked the darkness ahead.
A ridge I had barely noticed during daylight suddenly became important because someone was standing on it beneath the same sky, feeding wood into another flame.
Then I understood what the older man had meant.
You weren’t alone tonight.
Centuries ago, a person standing where I stood might have watched another midsummer fire on another hill and known that people were awake there too.
Beyond that fire, perhaps another community was gathered.
And beyond them, another.
Not one official celebration.
Many local acts answering the same natural event.
A chain of recognition.
I tried to imagine Ireland without roads I recognized, without electrical lights, without towns glowing at the horizon.
In that darkness, a bonfire on a hill would have been enormous.
It would have announced human presence over miles.
We are here.
We see the sun turning.
We know what night this is.
The thought changed the fire behind me.
Until then I had been treating it as the centerpiece of an old custom.
Now it looked like a signal.
The woman joined me at the edge.
“This is what survives,” she said.
“The fires?”
“The instinct.”
She gestured toward the sky.
“To notice.”
The final color was draining from the west.
The longest day was giving way to the shortest darkness.
“You don’t need anybody to tell you the sun has reached its highest point,” she continued.
“You can see the year changing if you’re paying attention.
