BAD IN BLUE

While poking along the weedy banks of small, shallow lake where I like to stalk dragonflies, I saw this rather large wasp nectaring on a cluster of milkweed blooms. What caught my eye, of course, were the shiny, midnight-blue wings, which sparkled in the afternoon sunlight like the chromed front-end trim on my father's 1956 Olds '98. 

Though it superficially resembled the blackish-blue mud daubers of my youth, which used to build their cylindrical pottery-like nest tubes along the tops of the basement windows, this wasp was noticeably larger. Which I suppose some, to whom the size of such things matters, might interpret as bigger-equals-badder, and thus view such a winged beast as exponentially more frightening.

I just thought it was striking and made a portrait. Back home, I tentatively keyed the critter down as being a great black wasp, Sphex pensyvanicus, also known as a katydid hunter.  

Members of the digger wasp clan, they construct a burrow-like nest hole in the ground. Eggs are laid in this tunnel. The great black wasps then goes about hunting down and stinging such things as kaytdids and grasshoppers. Toxins in their sting paralyze rather than kill their prey. These still-living victims are then carried into the nursery as food-in-waiting for when their larvae young hatch. Kinda like putting away a stock of home-canned goods for the family. 

And when they're not out looking to zap and immobilize future meals for the kids, adult great black wasps like to dine on nectar and pollen. Which explains what it was doing on the milkweed…nothing like a bit of dessert after the hunt.  

SOON…

Time's river flows steadily, eternally onward, though its constant movement may not always be apparent. Especially not this year when winter became spring too early, then quickly turned into a seemingly endless summer of drought and blazing heat. Yet even then, as sweltering day turned into stifling night and back, again and again and again, week after week, our spinning earth continued to follow its ancient prescribed path around the sun. 

And regardless of how our perception might have become temporarily befuddled by local weather patterns, as our planet hurtled along through the vast darkness of space, that marvelous 23.4 degrees of axial tilt—the astronomical geometry which gives us our seasons—remained in effect throughout. And this simple fact will, as always, eventually take its toll. 

Of course the fluttering monarch butterfly in the overgrown field knows nothing of all this—or maybe it does, just not in a way we're capable of comprehending. Yet something within the makeup of this familiar orange-and-black insect understands. Something our human conceit, for all our technical cleverness, not only doesn't grasp, but can't even fathom. 

Perhaps the locus of this enigma, whatever it may be, is buried deep within the atoms of the helix chains of its DNA, a mysterious property yet undiscovered in the nucleic acid, or an odd polymeric molecule. Or maybe not; maybe the answer lies elsewhere. 

But something somewhere stirs within this little butterfly. A restlessness, an unease, which soon becomes a longing to began a journey which will carry it on fragile wings thousands of miles from its Ohio summer home—all the way to the high mountain of central Mexico. A distant place, unknown by the individual butterfly we find perched on a blooming teasel, but where the year before, its parents—or perhaps it grandparents—overwintered in the shelter of cool fir forests. 

How can such a thing be possible? How does the monarch know? How do you explain a miracle? Then again, maybe you don't. But time flows, the seasons turn, summer begins drawing to a close—and soon the monarchs in the field will feel that inexplicable tug and commence their wondrous southwestward odyssey.

Soon…very, very soon.           

GEESE IN A GOLDEN RIFFLE

I heard them before I saw them, these geese in a golden riffle. I'd taken Moon-the-Dog out for her dawn peregrinations. The sun was just making its way above the maples and hackberries up on the hill. From somewhere upstream a kingfisher screeched. 

Then, from downstream, the honk of a goose, a few muttered gabbles, and another honk or two. Geese rather than goose. 

At first I couldn't see anything. You'd think even a single jumbo Canada goose would be easily spotted. Let alone a bunch. But it was barely daylight, there's lots of brush along the river…and, I was still sipping my first cup of coffee. I had to amble down to the lower corner of the yard before I finally saw the flock—a dozen birds, standing in the shallows of a riffle thirty yards away. Most were watching me, making sure I wasn't up to something villainous. 

Geese in a riffle are always worth a look. But geese in a riffle gilded with the golden light of dawn are something special due to the magical light. I made a photo. Tell me what you think. Geese in a golden riffle by this morning's magical light.

REMEMBERING, MOURNING

“…and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and mourners go about the streets:”

— Ecclesiastes 12:5 

Grasshoppers hereabouts have not become burdens. But my creative desire has temporarily failed and there is mourning in the streets…or at least along this portion of the road where I live. Yesterday afternoon our neighbor Bob was found dead in his home. He was, I'm told, only 49 years old, and had appeared to be in good health.

Everyone is shocked, our hearts are heavy and aching. It was so sudden and unexpected it still seems unreal, and is hard to accept. Bob was good guy and a fine neighbor. A bachelor who liked to ride his motorcycle on the weekends, he was a smart and technically savvy guru with the local cable company. Quiet, friendly, always willing to help. 

When we arrived here a few years ago, Bob—whose house was directly across the street, and thus our closest neighbor—was one of the first to introduce himself. In fact, as we soon came to realize, perhaps the greatest blessing of our move here to this riverbank cottage were the wonderful neighbors who so genuinely and warmly accepted us into their fold. Bob, Mike and his wife (their's is the next house up from Bob's), and Everett (whose property adjoins mine, his house being across from Mike's) are the sort of neighbors you hope and pray for when moving into a new place; real treasures.

We all now mourn. I need to write a column and get it off, but can't manage to concentrate on work. As poet Edmund Spenser said: "…when the hart is ill assayde, How can Bagpipe, or ioynts be well apayd?" 

I'm simply too sad and upset, incapable for the time being of dredging up meaningful words and stringing them into competent sentences. Just as I'm obviously unable to say things clearly in this post; I know I'm not conveying what I feel, the sense of sorrow and loss, or even making an attempt to come to grips with the unfathomable mystery of such an event. When death enters our midst, I guess we're always left temporarily broken and stunned. I am, anyway.

Bob is already deeply and truly missed. By all of us. It was a privilege and pleasure to have him for my neighbor. And he will not be forgotten.

May his soul rest in peace.

LURKERS

lurk |lərk|
verb [ intrans. ]
(of a person or animal) be or remain hidden so as to wait in ambush for someone or something : a ruthless killer still lurked in the darkness.
• (of an unpleasant quality) be present in a latent or barely discernible state, although still presenting a threat : fear lurks beneath the surface.

*   *   *

I think the dictionary's definition pretty much says it all…except for a maybe few provenance details re. each image.

The shot of the lurking crab spider was made a week or so ago in my backyard patch of purple coneflowers. To my mind, the sneaky arachnid appears to be assessing the odds of perpetrating a successful malevolent act upon the unidentified skipper.

The snap of the equally sinister and scheming soft-shelled turtle came from the pool in front of the cottage two days ago. This cunning predator lurks both deep and shallow—directly on bottom in a good imitation of an alge-green stone, and cruising just under the surface, like Bruce-the-shark in Jaws. Here, it's grab a gulp of air and a quick up-periscope look to see if there might be a tasty duckling paddling about in unsuspecting bliss nearby.

A RAIN REVIVAL

We received some much-needed rain here yesterday morning. An hour of so's worth of thunderstorms which, once or twice—albeit only briefly—produced what could rightly could be called downpours. We've had a couple of other recent showers so insubstantial as to barely fit the definition, with little effect to the landscape. But this one was sufficient to inspire the brown-yellow grass to wake up and show a bit of green. Many of my flowers now look perkier, too. 

While the amount of rain was still not enough to cause more than an inch of rise in the river or create a discernable change in its color, the herons, kingfishers, blue-winged teal, and other denizens all seem to be enjoying themselves. It also must have encouraged the various sunfish and minnows to move from their refuge depths in the deepest pools back into the shallows. 

In mid-afternoon I watched a great blue heron stalk the water's edge across from the cottage. In twenty minutes the ol' feathered angler nailed four or five small fish—each of which was quickly dispatched and swallowed. 

What a difference a good shower makes to a parched land. The grass turns green again, flowers and shrubs revive and rally, and a great blue heron garners an easy meal.

PRECURSOR?

Whether it's because of weeks of record heat, or due to one of the worst droughts in decades—there's a brilliant patch of yellow-gold gleaming amid the clump of green water willow upstream. The color appeared about the first of the month and has been spreading daily. I find it both eye-catching and unsettling. 

Could this, in fact, be a precursor to autumn? 

More to the point, isn't this way too early, with July not yet ended, to ruminate on such dubious thoughts? 

Maybe. On the one hand, I've had enough of this baking and thirsting to do me for a lifetime. I don't like hot weather—and I'm especially not thrilled to be sweltering day and night for weeks on end. I don't enjoy observing flowers and shrubs wither and succumbed, or the lawn turn to bedstraw. And I truly hate seeing my beloved river so desperately shriveled—like watching an old friend with a fatal disease waste away. 

Yet neither do I like the notion that another summer is winding down. While summer is my least favorite of the seasons, intimations of its approaching boundary whispers a soft reminder of time's relentless passage, a subtle evocation of sand pouring through an hourglass. Which prompts the sagacious afterthought that the span of a man—like that of a season—is ultimately finite. 

Meanwhile, the golden patch grows…and amid my watching, I wonder.