Dragonfly visitation

Last fall, I admired this butterfly in a garden in the front of the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden Baden. Markus and I had gone with my parents, who were visiting, to see a retrospective of paintings by Emil Nolde. The exhibit included gardens inspired by paintings in the exhibition. That's a nice concept, in case you're in the museum business and can put the idea to use.

As I sat, a creature came flying through the air. It was an enormous, vibrantly green dragonfly. Hello! I said, as I always do. They are such graceful and playful characters, zipping this way and that, their long bodies stretching back from busy wings. The photo above looks like sidewalk and grass until you see the intersecting lines of a dragonfly in head-on flight. I took exactly two photos at considerable distance with an iPad, and here they are.

This evening, I saw a line of motion in the yard with a cat running in lively pursuit. A dragonfly! I'd never seen one in our backyard in Flein before. Yesterday on a hike we saw shimmery blue damselflies above water lilies on a woodland lake. Back when we lived in Salt Lake City, dusk would bring a swarm of the black and white striped dragonflies I call zebraflies. They clustered over our front lawn as if they were holding a convention (we think it was because we never treated our lawn with chemicals and because of the desert flowers in the curb strip, but secretly I always hoped they came because Simon sent them). The dragonfly I saw this evening was large, like the green one in Baden Baden. It flew in circles around the sculpture in our backyard. That gets my attention, because the sculpture is a companion to the one on Simons's grave in Salt Lake City (see slide show 4). 

The cat in the photo above (from a while ago) is Sam. He's the nearly identical brother to our other cat, Simon. Yes, we have a cat named Simon. And a deceased son named Simon. But it's more normal than it sounds. The cats came with their names (and probably caught our attention that way). Simon-the-Boy knew Simon-the-Cat. There has never been any danger of mixing them up.

Simon-the-Cat looked five years younger than his current eleven as he followed the dragonfly this afternoon. Then suddenly he was aloft, his long body stretching four or five feet off the ground. The dragonfly slipped away from his reaching claw, flew higher, and disappeared over the trees.

The tenth anniversary of Simon's death has given impulse for deep reflection. The Anniversary approaching post with all its links remains available for reading any time, but I'm removing the link to the video with the slide show of Simon's life. If you missed your chance to view it, drop me a note, and I'll figure something out. chapterthis@umich.edu