Looking through the Insect Archives, I realized that grasshoppers remind me of childhood, of hot walks on the pasture and long afternoons in the yard. Sitting in my quiet office, I can almost hear them. The click as they leap away and the receding buzz of wings, over and over again. These photos make me wish for tall itchy grass and hot dry wind, for a few hours of summer to spend with long departed friends.
Today has been almost summer-like. Very warm, very breezy, and very sleepy. A paper wasp worked under the eaves, a damselfly hunted in the irises, and something mantis-like prowled through the hydrangea. I did small, invisible chores in the house and in my office. Now I’m ready to find a quiet corner, curl up with the cats, and open the new book on my nightstand. Page one…
In case you’re wondering, the book is Rocks of Ages by Stephen Jay Gould.
Winter made another run through the yard last night, and today finds me yearning for the sun-filled, dragonfly days of summer. This photo, from last July, was one of the first I took with my iPhone camera. I was experimenting with the Photoshop Express application…
Navy jets are a fixture in the yard. Their roar punctuates life in Virginia Beach, which is home to Naval Air Station Oceana.
Today, one of the jets crashed. A fiery crash involving apartment buildings. I keep turning the news on, then turning the news off.
I don’t know this instinct, can’t name the impulse that forces me to look and look away and look again. It’s a sour, hollow place in my chest. Cold hands and burning eyes and a restless path from kitchen to television to yard to office to kitchen. It’s a dark weight in my mind, an unfocused pall of helplessness.
For lack of a better word, it’s grief. But why? The accident doesn’t belong to me. And yet I feel an urge to own it, to fold it into my life alongside all the other things that don’t belong to me but touch me anyway.
Rae Spencer 