Dragonfly Dance

It is so quiet here, the rumbling of scurrying ground squirrels is noticed.

We spend time purposefully still, and there is a long list of preparations before the move. There are ceiling fans and shelf paper projects, and moving boxes that are being filled and off-loaded, filled and off-loaded. Even with reorganizing, the kitchen is in.

We eat fruit and half sandwiches from paper plates held over an old table littered with scraps of linoleum, measuring tapes and T squares. The blinds are flung open to watch the tractors harvesting rows of alfalfa and farmers waiving as they make the curve.

Spiders watch us. We watch them, too.

It is a quiet street otherwise.

We met our neighbors, a couple from town who bought it as a project house. It does not have electricity to it yet, but it does have a well. We had to talk over a dying tree that needs to come down that is over our property lines.

As the day creeps along toward dusk and we head back to town, there is a virtual storm of dragonflies happily harvesting the bugs from the cornfields that flank the road. I worry that the car will kill some, but I needn't: they effortlessly clear a path.

The car seems to slow on its own to watch the spectacle.

There are thousands of them, maybe millions. Tomorrow I wonder if we will stop altogether right there in the middle of the road and become part of the lyrical swarm of millions of delicate wings defying gravity by moving these long, thick bodies through the air.

The colors flash as they spin and shift direction, glints of silver and green and red and yellow, and the cornfields move in the delicate breeze that I'm not sure isn't partly due to the dragonflies darting in and out of the stalks in search of their next meal.