mdyetmetaphor.com

It is the glistening autumnal side of summer. I feel a cool vein in the breeze, which braces my thought, and I pass with pleasure over sheltered and sunny portions of the sand where the summer’s heat is undiminished, and I realize what a friend I am losing.

Henry David Thoreau – American Naturalist, Essayist, Poet and Philosopher

Hmmm, do we have to let go of summer all at once?

As I put up this post, we are about to turn the page from the lazy river of summer to the leaves-underfoot pathways of autumn. The official date for the turning of the seasons is of course rather arbitrary. I like to think that it is more of a slow, graceful retiring, than a date on a calendar, as Thoreau so elegantly states it at the head of this post.

The transition always inspires in me a reflective mindset and a desire to cast a look back at the faces the summer that is ending has taken. For me that means recalling the highlights – the lifers – naturalist terminology for a species sighted for the first time – from my summer excursions into the heart of nature.

Pipevine Swallowtails do not usually make it across the Great Lakes into Ontario. But this summer some made the crossing. This specimen did not make it easy on me. I had to shoot through a gap in the foliage to capture the bright orange splotches and white-fringed borders that stand out so boldly against the blue-black wings.

Fortune smiled upon me when I caught sight of this Emergent Mayfly. It posed perfectly as it clung to a palm-shaped leaf – arching its slender body, extending its front legs and flaring its black-checkered wings as though soaking up the heat of the July day.

Horse flies are among the world’s largest flies and impossible to overlook. This Furrowed Horse Fly greeted me on a woodland path on a steamy August day. Its large, glistening compound eyes seemed to me to be taking in the full spendour of the day and inviting me to do so as well.

 I had to wait until early September to set eyes upon this Arrrow Clubtail which is classified as “imperiled in Canada”. It is a startlingly large dragonfly with emerald green eyes, broad yellow thorax stripes and the clubbed tail that gives this family of dragonflies its name. Fortunately for me, it was very patient and gave me several minutes to admire it.

And so, with this retrospective, the lazy river of summer is drawing to a close. But the ending is not a firm date on a calendar. Thoreau says it best so I will give the final word to him.

Summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point in time, like the turning of a leaf.

~  Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel (now out of print) which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .

~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka That Make Me Go Hmmm at its’ internet home www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog2. Instructions for subscribing are provided in the Subscribe to this Blog: How To instructions page in the right sidebar. If you’re reading this post on another social networking site, come back regularly to my page for postings once a week

Tags:   Arrow Clubtail · Emergent Mayfly · Furrowed Horse Fly · Henry David Thoreau · last day of summer · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · Pipevine SwallowtailNo Comments