Dragonflies are on my mind and absolutely everywhere right now. They struck (or re-emerged from) my consciousness a year ago, when a very large one took a very long nap in a window of my house-under-construction. I thought he was dead, an inert, grey-brown surreal thing gathering dust (keeping company with a broken shim, a paint lid, and some bent nails) on the sill. I was installing flooring at the time, working long and late and hard, often alone. This was a time of restless nights and strange dreams for me… like the dream about cows grazing on acres of my newly installed oak flooring. Cows slipping and tipping and help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up and what was I thinking, laying down acres of hardwood in a cow pasture? Anyway—the supposedly dead dragonfly was an object of interest and conversation when I brought the kids to the house one night. We looked at him, talked about him, and left him there because he was so very big no one wanted to touch him. We were tired of cleaning, and he was sort of an exotic trophy worth keeping anyway. Even if keeping only meant leaving him there.
The next morning when I glanced in the window, he was mysteriously and inexplicably gone. A wave of loss washed over me. But then I discovered that he wasn’t actually gone. Instead, there he was again, as motionless and dead as ever, high up on the wall in the nook overlooking the foyer. I was so sure that he was dead and always had been that I concluded he was pinned to the wall–it was a very Hitchcockian moment. Was it a joke? Or a prank? Why would someone pin my dragonfly on the wall? I mentioned the dragonfly drama to one of the men helping with trim that day. “Oh no, he’s not dead, he’s probably just sleeping”, he said. “Come see.” He sprinted up the stairs, walked to the wall, and stroked the dragonfly’s body with a long finger. His gentleness and interest in the creature surprised me, and so did the creature, when it stirred and flew away. The morning’s mystery and hurt (and even the haunting cobwebs of strange cow dreams) lifted and flew away with the dragonfly. “My wife would say that was a good omen”, said my friend. “She loves dragonflies”.
Loves dragonflies. It hadn’t occurred to me, as a grown woman, to seriously love an insect. Not even ladybugs, which have fascinated me from my childhood (ladybug, ladybug), through my teenage summertime experiment station days (working for an entymologist), up to my current life as a gardener (oh the good things that ladybugs do for a garden!). Loving an insect (or any animal) had always seemed…well… like little girl sentimentality (strangely expensive to me). Or superstition. A club game, stocked with sticker collections and poster tacking. Which is your favorite? Which one is yours (say-say oh playmate)? Horses? Bunnies? Butterflies? I had never chosen a favorite anything, had never chosen the animal or bug that defined me. (Though I’d often secretly wished for that fortune-teller moment, when someone would say oh yes, you are a meadowlark, or a gazelle, or a Sphinx moth. And though somewhere between fourth and fifth grade I pretended to be a horse with my friend Julie–horses were her favorite). I had never really Belonged to a Club (until annual staff my senior year). Why? I cannot say. Thinking about it now, I feel sad.
When I was little, Dad showed us where to look for dragonfly nymphs in mountain streams when we went camping. He used them as bait for fishing. It amazed me that something so grotesque and clumsy would first of all be called a nymph (I thought nymph implied beauty, but Dad said no, in this case nymph is about water) and secondly that it would eventually become something so graceful and ethereal as a dragonfly. I wonder, now, where all the dragonfly nymphs are. Where do all these dragonflies I’m seeing begin? There are no mountain streams in my backyard or on my block, only irrigation canals and the occasional swampy pasture. And yet, there is every size and shape and color of dragonfly– mostly tiny though–from the familiar neon greens and blues to even reds and yellows. But especially, there are the truly dragon ones, the brown-grey ones that are so big, so so big that their gravitational pull tugs at my gaze. I cannot ignore them. Like the creature I thought was dead in the window. And these are my favorites, now. I do love dragonflies, after all. This summer, I am a Dragonfly Girl.
This summer, dragonflies appear (like good omens) at just the right moments. Saturday night, I packed myself tight with thousands of other people in an outdoor stadium. It had been a long, anxious day. The commentator made clever jokes while we waited for the show to begin; I wanted to snap at him. Frank was there next to me, smiling, though heat is harder for him to bear than it is for me. And I was stifled by it (the temperature crawled past 100 that day), and by my own inner conflict. I was completely out of pace with the event we were all there to see. The crowd around me was joyful and celebrating; my joy was motionless–if not dead, then comatose. I thought the noise might make me crazy—I longed for escape, or at least for a grasp of something unstaged, uncontrived, familiar and beloved–and then a dragonfly swept by, one of the real dragon ones. It turned my head with its grace, and as I followed its flight, my eye caught the outline of the mountains just beyond the stadium lights, and my heart lifted. Or settled… I’m not sure which. Anyway, joy or not, settled or flying, it was a good moment for me. Something to hang onto and keep apace with.
