It’s almost too good a day to think about politics. There’s nothing happening anyway, except that the mortgage crisis is going into meltdown mode, (funny how these things tend to happen on Sundays lately) but who’s thinking about that? The remnants of Hanna seem to have scoured the air and, as such storms so often do, left great weather in its wake.
I am sitting here on my patio, watching something that you can only see on a few days of the year, and which no picture can capture. The air in our yard is thick with tiny insects of some sort. You can only see them when the sun hits them just right, like the specks of dust you see in the sunlight streaming in a window. Scores of dragonflies, which I have not seen before today, are swarming in their midst, presumably gorging on them. No doubt they are eating well, but they’re not making a dent in the apparent numbers, which seem to be infinite. The dragonflies are so big that I had to confirm with binoculars that they weren’t birds. Until the sun hit the little mites at the right angle, the dragonflies seemed to be flying at random, but their purpose is now clear.
I’ve often thought that if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that I have to work for a living, it would be fun to spend a year chronicling the changes in this little slice of the earth. I don’t know if the dragonflies have put in an appearance before today; but they weren’t here last week, and I suspect that by next week, they’ll be gone, to be replaced by some other transient phenomenon. We have a backyard that has many of the properties of a meadow. It is surrounded on three sides (more or less) by trees, with the westerly side bordered by about 800 acres of open space. Due to my inherent laziness, and the inordinate amount of time I spend on this blog, the forest is creeping in around us, so at least part of our property probably qualifies as de facto open space. Even if we weren’t operating a birdie soup kitchen in the middle of it all, there would still be an abundance of wildlife making their living here. In any event, my seat out here in the patio is a perfect place to watch the show, and today’s is peculiarly spectacular.
UPDATE: A reader emailed a link to an article about Dragonflies in the New Haven Register. They are interesting little creatures and the article is quite well written.
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