The Dragonfly

Hungry is the lone hunter; here sits "Brother Dragonfly".

I've always loved dragonflies. My middle brother hated them when we were kids because they're big and scary, but he's also highly allergic to bee stings, so pretty much all bugs are on his "no" list. But, I love them: their gossamer wings, their iridescent and sleekly bejeweled bodies, their swooping, precise aerobatics... I think they are so beautiful and strong. Many other cultures feel that way, too. 

The Dragonfly, up close: a study in beauty and aerodynamics.

Years ago, I was inspired to draft and draw a children's story about a dragonfly (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-isle-of-dragonfly-on-pubslush.html), using the noble, high-flying hunter as a symbol and metaphor that would also speak to an adults' poetic sensibilities. I usually see them flying and dipping high above my head, but the other afternoon, I was privileged (and very surprised) to see a young beauty perched on an old yellow house that sits high on a hill in the lower Hudson Valley. I consider it a very good sign on this year's last, warm 68° day in New York.  

So close! I hold my breath, and take another picture.

http://www.dragonfly-site.com/meaning-symbolize.html

The Praying Mantis

Shit, dude! I open the door to an extremely large Praying Mantis that scuttles towards me and a yellow grocery bag very quickly.

Years ago after college, I set up camp at an aunt's old apartment way out in Kensington, a still unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhood that remains resistant to gentrification and most types of hipsters, barring the toughie who likes to visit authentically scary, rundown Irish bars with actual Cirrhosis-nose victims. You know, those telltale purple and red broken blood vessels of the nose that come to all who spend the bulk of their days sodden and drunk on a bar stool. To give myself a break from the grind, I'd hooked up with a state school friend and her Roosevelt Island crew; a wealthy set of upper middle class kids who still smoked pot and drank mostly unmolested, because their hippie parents smoked with them, either in their upper west side apartments, or in their posh "rustic" cabins in upstate New York. 

That thing is, like, horror-movie huge.

Naturally, they were clustered around "tighty whitey" affluent Woodstock, and I felt uncomfortable in both locales, because unlike these boarding school kids, I was (and am) a product of actual working class roots, which is not so cool when you want to light up with your parents in their impeccably decorated country homes with an Acadian who doesn't play around with that mess. It was horribly awkward and the whole situation eventually blew up like I knew it would, with broken loyalties and intermittent friendships that lasted between high school and college, over divided lovers and who slept with who and when and such, the usual typically boring hippie shit, but in the meantime, summer was warm and fine in these rich kids parents' apartments around the city. 

Damn, dude. What crevice did you crawl out of?!

On one day, me and a bunch of these kids lit up on the terrace during an absolutely gorgeous summer NYC afternoon, enjoying the cool high floor breezes over glasses from a fully flowing batch of Margaritas that stood on the outdoor cafe table in a beautiful glass pitcher. The parents were gone, and harmony ruled the day. Surprisingly for such a high apartment, this kids' parents also had a stunning garden of plants and flowers, which we enjoyed greatly, watching the lazy, fat bees circle above them, surprised that they could make the journey to the 80th floor, or however fucking high we were. It was awesome! 

Great. Now it's scaling the front of the house, to attack from above.

And then, just like that, the vibe changed, when this ginormous fucking preying mantis landed on the edge of a planter, grabbed a bee as quick as a gunshot, ripped its' fucking head off, and then sucked the goo out of its' neck, like we sucked drinks from a straw. What was even weirder, is in that exact space of 60 seconds, each and every one of our group all saw it at the exact same time, as we screamed our heads off, like we just watched a 60s horror flick for the first time, high and drunk and getting more so by the minute. It was glorious, it was summer, we were 20-somethings in the city, and life was good. That was what I thought about later, after the initial shock of seeing a huge preying mantis scuttle at me on the old porch of a big farmhouse in the Hudson Valley on a warm day wore off. It was that good.

For scale: note size of house number in relation to "It".

Wild Calico Kitty

At the beginning of the summer, I saw two little kitties wandering around the basement of a white house, on a street I always walk down. One was black and white, and the other calico. I still see them occasionally during the daytime, but they're a lot better at hiding from prying human eyes, which makes them really hard to spot. 

Sometimes I wonder if they live in one of the big, old houses on the block, so they can be tended to by one of the kindly retirees who like to garden, maybe leaving them saucers of milk outside by the back door, but I also like the idea of them running around town as a kitty dynamic duo, killing small birds, chipmunks, and other small animals that burrow in among the wood piles.  Fare thee well, hunter.