That's when the cardinal comes for the last crumb on the patio wall. The scrawny squirrel limps down the driveway toward the woods. The hummingbird makes its final visit to the sugar water. And from the deep shadows of the woods, the owl softly asks "Who? Who?"

Lying on the porch couch, I am about to drift off when suddenly there is a small presence beside me.

It is my grandson, Wade, 5, who is visiting while his parents are out of town. His grandmother, "Mimi," has tucked him into bed and is abroad somewhere else in the house.

The wily little guy has stealthily tiptoed down the hall, through the den and the kitchen, to reach me. In his shark-spangled pajamas, he nestles against me on the narrow sofa. I decide not to report him to the Authority right away, thinking he may shortly succumb to the sandman's spell.

Suddenly, his body jerks, and he whispers hoarsely, "Lightning bugs!" The night is speckled with fireflies, tiny bright asterisks on the dark manuscript of the sky. Fireflies are nonexistent at his Florida home.

I firmly nix his eagerness to participate in the childhood ritual of capturing the insects in a jar with holes in the lid and watching them do their pyrotechnics in their glass cells. I remind him that, after all, he is AWOL from bed.

When I see lightning bugs, I always think of a column written years ago by syndicated writer Anna Quindlen.

In it, she described a women's magazine survey that asked women why they decided to have children. Five possible answers were listed.

Quindlen, choosing "none of the above," said she had children "because sometime in my life, I wanted to stand at a window with a child and show him the lightning bugs and have him say, 'Mommy, it's magic!' "

"Snowdaddy, how do lightning bugs die?" Wade asks.

"In time, their little hearts stop beating," I answer, remembering my own preoccupation with the dread of dying when I was his age.

"But you will not die for a long, long time," I assure him. "If you eat more peas and carrots and less macaroni and pizza, you will grow up to be a big man, get married, have kids of your own and, if you're lucky, have a little grandson just like the one I have."

His thoughts of dying were probably prompted by a minidrama that occurred that morning while I was at the office.

Walking with Wade past the open barrel of rainwater I had collected, my wife discovered a chipmunk swimming desperately. As the little creature was going down for the third time, she fished him out.

For a while, the animal lay semiconscious on the concrete, but he eventually stirred. The tail that is normally raised like a pickup truck antenna as he races about the yard now dragged limply behind him as he trudged away.

Wade's next question is a natural: "How do birds sleep?"

"Birds sleep with one eye open," I explain, "and with one half of their brain awake while the other half sleeps. And also, the sleepier they get, the more tightly their toes wrap around the limb on which they're sitting."

By now, he is yawning, and when his much-loved Mimi comes to claim him, he offers no resistance. But as he is being marched to bed, he darts back to the porch, gives me a quick squeeze and says, "Snowdaddy, I love you more than you love me!"

It's a great line, but it works, as it and others like it will later work with the girls he meets and the bosses he works for.

Sometime in the night, he crawls into our bed. From then on, it is like sleeping with a bulldozer working overtime at a landfill.

But that, too, as you grandparents well know, is a part of the magic, the magic of lightning bugs at twilight and of being totally loved by a little boy. For it is a child who brings the magic to lightning bugs. And to life.