Dangle Like A Chrysalis



Checking emails: spam, selling stuff, Facebook birthday list, and a reply. Craig from Buglife (www.buglife.org.uk) identifying the Jewelwing we thought we saw as a native Beautiful Demoiselle. Calopteryx Virgo, though not rare in this habitat, does not disappoint. (http://british-dragonflies.org.uk/species/beautiful-demoiselle)
Spiders weave webs, or hunt, they plot, they stalk, they trap. They cannibalise freely for they are not obviously sentimental. But over the fields each year, the web pod nurseries are fixed into grass clumps, keeping the spider young safe. Ants are many acting as one, sublimated to purpose, a society of absorbed co-operation. Bees speak to each other in a language of dance. Woodlice are an early design, a segmented ancientness. Metamorphic invertebrates are my favourites, for their symbolism.
Head brimful of glittering wings, of flight paths, lazily drive into town. There are traffic lights at the double roundabout. A colourful configuration of cars are filled with inconvenienced people. Put the radio on, wave at the splendid lady in the blue metallic mini who doesn’t block my drive.
Things I like about my town include a parking space bartered for with homemade cider, the Norman castle and the little tin men who hit the bell on the town hall clock. Also we have shops, not just chain owned stores. I buy a pack of card from such a shop, from a man who asks am I making wedding invites, only it’s the season for it. A wedding card, I tell him, my niece is getting married in June, and there is a first, a sixteenth and a twenty-first birthday all in June too. A busy month, he deduces; his daughter loves to make cards. I consider buying a stamp, with a dragonfly on it; content myself with a look and a maybe later. Now is not the time to collect anything but my thoughts and some cardboard boxes, while we wait on news, and I tell myself, wait with poise, with purpose, with catalystic intention, dangle like a chrysalis. 


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