The sun has gone down and with it the heat. At the other end of the farm, the moon has yet to rise, though enough light remains to see dark rows of raspberry bushes and a pale field road climbing into a darker forest of corn. Dusk is being replaced by something else: the flickering bioluminescence of fireflies. This summer’s heat coupled with last summer’s rains have produced a bumper crop of lightning bugs, all flashing intermittently. These winking green lights are a sexual beacon to other fireflies. The males flash and glow and the females signal back. Even a bystander can sense the night fill with yearning.

We’re sitting around a small fire at the edge of the raspberry patch waiting for the moon to rise. It’s early August and already the end of the raspberry season. In a week or so, there will be the creaking of crickets instead of this heavy stillness. You can almost feel summer poised to begin its steady descent into autumn, as if tonight were a fulcrum that could tilt either way.

My wife and her sister planted early varieties – Killarneys, Novas, and Jewels – on an acre of what had been alfalfa. They mulched the raspberry canes with woodchips, planted clover between the rows, and trellised the thorny branches by stringing wire between T-posts. They hired pickers and conscripted spouses. They bought a commercial refrigerator for the barn to keep the fragile berries cool until they could be sold by the pint to groceries and farmer’s markets.

An acre of raspberries is a lot to pick. It’s the equivalent of a football field minus the end zones. On hot days I’d finish a one-hundred-yard row, then start over again to find the unpicked berries already softening. It was a race against ripeness. It was also a race against picnic beetles, fruit worms, and the spotted-wing Drosophilia, a fruit fly that lays its eggs in overripe berries and turns them to a maggoty pulp. The taste of raspberries must be woven into the DNA of even the simplest organism, along with an innate understanding of summer as something sweet that’s over too soon.

After more than a century, the farm itself is up in the air – some siblings want to take their inheritance in money and others in land – and while the family debates whether to sell, my wife and her sister did, on a small scale, what previous generations had always done: made the land pay. So we’re celebrating the end of raspberry season with a campfire and a cooler of beer. Every face within this circle of firelight belongs to someone I’ve known the better part of my life. I’d tell them how much they mean to me except that it would spoil the mood.

A brother-in-law shouts and we all look up to see the moon, nearly full, float above the cornfield. Something in that muted light, the way the moon has turned the tasseled field a deep blue-gray, reminds me of an Edvard Munch painting I’d seen years ago in Chicago.  “Summer Night’s Dream” is not as edgy or expressionistic as Munch’s better known “The Scream” and falls on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. A woman in a white dress stands in a grove of trees, backlit by just such a shaft of yellow light.  She stares off the canvas, arms behind her back, face inclined forward, her features blurred not only by the dim moonlight but by her own intense yearning. Every part of the young woman’s body is held in check except her eyes, which are wide-open. What is she looking at? Her lover, perhaps. Or maybe she’s just lost in the evening itself, in the ineffable beauty of the moment, knowing it won’t last.

That’s how I feel tonight—as if nothing else matters, not tomorrow or the next day or whatever lies beyond.  Sometimes it’s enough to hold tight to the moment, to sit in the glow of things, your heart swollen with emotions that you can’t explain because if you opened your mouth to try you couldn’t be sure what might come out.

John Hildebrand is professor emeritus of English at UW-Eau Claire and the author of several books, including his most recent, The Heart of Things: A Midwestern Almanac, in which this piece originally appeared and is used with permission of the author.