Today

Nature is so vast that learning about it never ends. Today I discovered that night mid August is delightful because the cicadas aren't just here making noise, they're in the branches of the surrounding trees laying their eggs. My son said he'd never seen a cicada, but I was lucky enough to find a dead one once. I kept it for a while and liked how it's shiny clear wings with thin black lines like a stained glass window were flat on its dark brown back. Mark Doty says that so much writing really is about the practice of observation so it makes perfect sense to me that some of the best writers are scientists, biologists, people who use language in notebooks to detail what they observe. This morning I saw the tallest sunflower in my garden with a queen bee busy in the intricate pattern of its seed head, gathering pollen, making its limbs heavy with yellow dust. It's a wonder they can fly with such fat yellow pants! There was a moment that I most wanted to photograph -- the bee was hovering before the flower, near contact, but space and time separated the two. I think this moment on the verge of being, to capture that is exciting, it's as if we are able to enter time and know that it will pass but have it both ways, eternal and ephemeral at once.
One other thing I learned today is that grasshoppers really do eat grass and some will devour a pumpkin patch. There are many kinds of grasshoppers with different palettes. I read that in September they seem to rise out of the grass and hop onto porches; I would like to see that.