Jewel in the Summer Wind

Female Halloween Pennant
(Celithemis eponina)

Swaying back and forth in the wind yesterday as I tried to capture this glorious creature on my memory card, I remembered something from many moons ago, and it made me smile. Who knows what recess of the old noggin the memory had been hiding in?

On a fine summer day long past, I was poking about on the school playground at noon and saw a gorgeous golden dragonfly.  When it flew off into the nearby woods, I followed it hoping for a closer look, and enchanted by the legions of gilded Odonata swooping and swirling through the air in a clearing, I sat down with my back against a tree to watch them for a few minutes and forgot about the time.  I didn't remember to go back to class until almost the end of the school day, and the nuns were not amused - I vaguely remember being expelled for a day or two and a letter being sent home to my embarrassed and apologetic parents.  A whole bag of adjectives peppered their reprimand to me at the time: wild, unruly, thoughtless, disobedient, intractable.

Plus ca change, plus ca reste le meme... Fast forward fifty years, and here I am in the woods on another summer day, being chewed by bugs and happy as a clam at high water - I'm well past sixty now and to quote the great Paul Simon, still crazy after all these years.  I'm still enchanted by dragonflies and breathless every time I encounter one, still following them into the trees at every opportunity, still thankful that the Old Wild Mother creates such wonders and I am around to see them. I rather think that the dragonfly which so enchanted me that day was the wondrous winged entity pictured above.

I have a better camera now though, and I no longer need a darkroom.  I could never have taken anything like these images with the Brownie Bullet that was my constant companion when I was just a tadpole learning the timeless arts of truancy, and I always seemed to be penniless then, having spent my meager pocket money on film for that dear little Kodak box camera.