Where are the dragonflies?

We’ve already had a mosquito hatch that has filled the air with the little biters. So far, there are not enough predators to reduce the population. Dragonflies won’t appear in numbers until later this month and early June. Is the mosquito hatch early this year? Has evolution buffered dragonfly hatches so that there will usually be plenty of food (mosquitos, etc.) by the time dragons fly? If corporations were involved, would they try to lean out the supply chain of mosquitos, even if it meant the death by starvation of a number of customers?

common green darner

Photo by J. Harrington

Frogs have been making evening and nighttime noises for weeks now. I think frogs eat mostly insects. I wonder what the frogs have been feeding on until the mosquitos started to hatch. Is a frog quick enough to catch and eat a mosquito, or do they mostly feed on the larvae? There’s so much I don’t know!

The transition from winter to summer continues. The snow blower is now stored behind the lawn mower. The battery for the electric start on the mower is recharging. Fresh gas will be added one day soon, after we’ve finished picking up the dead branches from the parts of the lawn that get cut with the push mower instead of the tractor. I’ve decided I'm actually beginning to prefer the look of our creeping Charlie and violets lawn, rather than grass. I’m also getting better at not beating myself up for not getting everything done in one day and then spending the next three hobbling around. I may never age gracefully, but I can try to age more peacefully. To that end, I think it’s time to go look for some common green darners.

Fly, Dragonfly!

By Joyce Sidman

Water nymph, you have

climbed from the shallows to don

your dragon-colors.

Perched on a reed stem

all night, shedding your skin, you dry

your wings in moonlight.

 

Night melts into day.

Swift birds wait to snap you up.

Fly, dragonfly! Fly!

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Please be kind to each other while you can.

Truth or Dare?

The following are headlines from the on-line editions of today’s newspapers. The first one makes an assertion. The rest, although not written as such, in my opinion validate that assertion. My question is, what, if anything, are we going to do in response? I’m leaning toward joining the Luddite-Anarchist party myself but there may be an even better option. Read on!

FROM The Guardian

• ‘America is broken’: FBI criticized for mass-shooting survival video
• New Mexico shooting: at least three dead and multiple wounded
• Mormon church has $100bn ‘clandestine hedge fund’, says whistleblower
• ‘Impossible to hold him accountable’: DeSantis signs laws to ease 2024 run
• US supreme court pursuing rightwing agenda via ‘shadow docket’, book says

FROM The Star-Tribune

• Twin Cities metro roads have become far more dangerous since the pandemic began 
• Lawmakers pulling together exemption for Mayo Clinic in Minnesota nurse staffing bill
• Man receives 103-year sentence for killing 4 in St. Paul, hiding bodies in Wisconsin field
• Minneapolis police respond to fights at DFL convention
• Windom pork plant was losing $6M a month, bankruptcy files reveal

Now, your mileage may vary, but I’m hard pressed to find enough positive stories to balance the ones listed above. I could simply ignore the news and social media but that doesn’t mean the negative events aren’t happening. Perhaps America isn’t yet broken, but we’ve certainly lost our way and can’t even agree on which direction’s home. Then again, would we recognize home these days if we were there?

is this apple tree broken?

Photo by J. Harrington

There is one way to find that answer. I recently finished reading Rob Hopkins' From What Is to What If. If you share the kind of concerns implicit in today’s posting, see if you can get your hands on a copy and read it. It may suggest the best ways we have available of being the kind of ancestors our descendants will bless rather than curse.

Now What

Solmaz Sharif

And so I sat at a tall table
in an Ohio hotel,
eating delivery:
cheese bread

with garlic butter, only it was
not butter, but partially
hydrogenated soy
bean oil

and regular soybean oil and it
came in a little tub like
creamer that’s also not
dairy.

America in 2019
means a poem will have to
contain dairy that is,
in fact,

not dairy. On Instagram: a man
has bought a ten foot by four
foot photo of a bridge
he lives

beside, bridge he can see just outside
his window, window which serves
as a ten foot by four
foot frame.

My materialist mind, I can’t
shake it. Within a perfect
little tub of garlic
butter,

a relief of workers, of sickles,
fields of soy. We were tanners
pushed to the edge of the
city

once, by the stench, the bubble of vats
of flesh and loosening skin,
back when the city pulled,
leather

bucket by leather bucket, its own
water from wells. Then we worked
the cafeterias
at the

petroleum offices of the
British. Then, revolution—

Simple.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.