The Fair Folk

Artsy pond photo, for starters.

Before I bore you with Odonata classifications, allow me to bore you with unabashed bragging. My son is really smart. Always, even as a young child, he always possessed a literal mind. While that has at times been a nightmare for whimsical me, it is also often a joy to behold. At the age of nine, one of his favorite movies is Titanic. He knows more about Titanic than most people three times his age. But I got tired of fast forwarding past the boob parts of that movie, so I decided he should find some other nautical disaster movie to obsess over. He also likes tornadoes and hurricanes, so I introduced him to The Perfect Storm. And he loved it. How I relish these little parenting moments. But here is the bragging part: once he got done watching the movie, he decided that the world simply needed a Lego Andrea Gail. So he invented it.

Charlie's super cool Lego Andrea Gail.

You can trust this face.

That said, I figured my last post had gone on far too long about the names of bugs and the superiority of my commonwealth over your state (neaner neaner boo boo) so I wrapped up without sharing with you the damselfly half of the Odonata world. You thought you were safe. WRONG! Much like the way I annoy my dear husband by endlessly bringing home buckets of shells from the river, I intend to annoy you by pontificating upon the names of the flying insects I photograph at the river. And if you choose to stop reading, you better think again because catastrophic universal consequences will result bringing about an inevitable world collapse. Oh yeah!

I doubt that my sons are as thrilled with river swimming as I am most days. For them, one part of the fun of swimming is the actual swimming, but the greater part is that at swimming pools, one finds other kids. Not so much, the river. At the river there are, of course, huge-ish fish, and also pointy faced fish, and also zippy crayfish. There are rocks, shells, and Water Willow flowers in a veritable sea. There are Cliff Swallows in a colony under the bridge, occasional snakes, turtles, and mice. I realize all of that is probably enough to convince most of my readers never to visit, but it's a great place for me. The kids like it too, but they just think there should be more kids there. Or maybe just Daddy. The river is even better with a Daddy in it, because he makes us all braver.

Shooting the rapids!  (Do not try this at home.
Besides your home's lack of a river, this photo
was totally staged.)

American Rubyspot, probably male, not that
I asked him or anything

The thing about the river that makes it for me, though, is that it is the easiest place to believe in fairies. At the shady edge of the stony shoal where the Water Willow grows thickest, there the fair folk dance. Their wings move so fast it seems like they hover on the power of magic alone, dressed in colors as vivid as any flower. The move so nimbly around each other that it seems there must be steps to their dance. Watching them, it isn't hard to imagine where the idea of tiny fey spirits might have come from.

Vivid Blue Dancers, not dancing at all, just
sitting around on coffee break

Of course, the fey of legend are not pretty Tinkerbells. Come to think of it, even Tinkerbell was not the innocent that Disney made her. She and they were ephemeral, enigmatic, and often capricious creatures just as likely to do harm as good and see nothing wrong with doing it. The insect world of the Odonata fills out that part of the myth as well. They might come to rest on your shoulder to awe or to startle. They might perch on a branch to observe you or to issue challenge. Of course, to mosquitoes, they are flying death. Some are as vain as Tinkerbell ever had it in her tiny heart to be, and others as elusive (to the photographer, at least) as any shy naiad of stories. It is this that I see at the river, where I breathe free.

Violet Tail Damselfly who seriously needs
a more imaginative name

Damselfly Love

Damselfly Love 2

Bizarre love child of Butterfly and
Dragonfly is Owlfly. Shouldn't it be
a Butterdragon or something?

While I hope that the naturalist adventures to which I am prone provide something unmatched in my sons' childhood, I am also grateful for the kindness of family and neighbors. In my last post, I wrote about camping at Hueston Woods. That trip was made possible by the letter "S", as in Grandpa Stanley and Grandma Shelley Crum. The week following that, Nana and G-pa Pearson put up with the considerable discomfort of sleeping on our couches so that they could take us bowling, swimming, and to the zoo. Grandparents, if it weren't for you, my boys would probably think that there was no civilization in this world.

Lucy thinks we're totally square!

And peacocks are just
fancy dress roosters.
They will totally
attack you if you're
getting all paparazzi
on their feathered
expletive deleted.

The week after all the grandparental adventures, we received a surprise invitation from Steve, Angie, Easton, and Best Case Farms for the boys to go on a special fishing trip. The boys were thrilled, and I discovered that right here on my own home road is a hidden paradise the likes of which I could not have imagined. The boys had a great time fishing, and I had fun rowing (and not crashing!) a boat. Big thanks to Steve, Angie, Easton, and Best Case. You're Fair Folk too!

No one happier than a boy and his fish!