Her tears burn while he turns to gold
The first of this summer's monarchs hatched this morning. It clung to the netting beside the translucent green chrysalis of one of its younger cohorts for several hours, then began fluttering around the confines of its habitat so eagerly that it would barely deign to light on the inside of an open shoebox to be transferred to the front steps and fractionally to my hand before taking wing. It was last seen investigating some wildflowers planted against the fence across the street. We are not quite placing bets on whether the next darkening chrysalis, ink-veined with emergent wings, even waits out the night.
Yesterday![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I spent several hours wandering around Whipple Hill in Lexington, which I cannot remember ever visiting when younger, even though it is exactly one of the kinds of landscape I love, its trails winding through different zones of forest like a mythago wood—pine, oak, hickory—constantly broken through with bones of granite and gabbro, lichen-scrawled boulders stranded among the trees that grew in generations around them. I said as we were descending from the summit which did a magnificent job of looking birch-sparse and mountainous for its 375 feet, "I think the two most beautiful words in the English language are 'terminal moraine.'" It was raining lightly on us throughout; I would put on my rain hat and take it off as soon as I overheated. The drought was visible in the mud and dead leaves where there should have been the branches of a brook, the pond which had drained to a sewer of rotten weeds. Acorns fell around us. Toward sunset the trails became suddenly full of dog-walkers and we escaped onto the streets which closely pen in the conservation land in the weirdly supernal way which really produces the illusion of swallowing you up on the dirt-path side of the parking lot. I liked the vernal pool like something out of Burnt Norton.
I was going to say it has been an exhausting week, but so was last week.rushthatspeaks has sent me excellent mermaid art.
Yesterday
spatch and I spent several hours wandering around Whipple Hill in Lexington, which I cannot remember ever visiting when younger, even though it is exactly one of the kinds of landscape I love, its trails winding through different zones of forest like a mythago wood—pine, oak, hickory—constantly broken through with bones of granite and gabbro, lichen-scrawled boulders stranded among the trees that grew in generations around them. I said as we were descending from the summit which did a magnificent job of looking birch-sparse and mountainous for its 375 feet, "I think the two most beautiful words in the English language are 'terminal moraine.'" It was raining lightly on us throughout; I would put on my rain hat and take it off as soon as I overheated. The drought was visible in the mud and dead leaves where there should have been the branches of a brook, the pond which had drained to a sewer of rotten weeds. Acorns fell around us. Toward sunset the trails became suddenly full of dog-walkers and we escaped onto the streets which closely pen in the conservation land in the weirdly supernal way which really produces the illusion of swallowing you up on the dirt-path side of the parking lot. I liked the vernal pool like something out of Burnt Norton.
I was going to say it has been an exhausting week, but so was last week.
rushthatspeaks has sent me excellent mermaid art.
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The vernal pool is wonderful.
P.
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The other week, I sighted a stray monarch in the Radcliffe Garden. It lifts the heart.
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lichen-sprawled boulders --very nice. A natural graffiti, stones tagged in slow time.
And blessings on your monarch--may it drink nectar, pollinate, migrate, and reproduce, all while enjoying this part of its life to the fullest.