August 18 Dragonflies

We are still at the cottage in the Quebec bush. All there is to entertain us are the woods and lakes and our imaginations: they have sufficed. Today goes down as the day that a bit of heaven came down to earth in the form of dragonflies. Yes, dragonflies. You see – they eat the mosquitoes and other noxious bloodsucking vermin that make these north woods uninhabitable for several months a year. But now, in late summer, nature has had time to create the antidote for them – dragonflies.

I love them.

I love them as I drive down the road to pick blueberries. The blueberries are plentiful this year – as is to be expected in the cycle of life after a terrible harvest last year. We picked a mere 40 minutes but each of us filled our baskets. And the sun! Just the right temperature and soaking into old bones as we sat between bushed laden with blue treasure – a treasure a pirate could lust after. Mind you, the berries are small, but to toss a few warmed by that sun was to taste a bit of heaven itself.

I love them – those dragonflies, as we sat on the rocks of the waterfall and as my girls slid down the steep and slippery cliff into the pool of warm water below. What a place. On Mont Diable [Devil mountain] the ice ages scraped and chiseled to leave a shallow lake near the mountain's top with a rocky granite boulder strewn stream with fresh, but for the north surprisingly warm, waters jumping from boulder to boulder and pool to pool through the dark forest green until the smooth rockface of the almost vertical (well, it feels that way as you slide down!) where sheets of silver only inches deep careen into a deep pool – just the right depth for shrieking children and parents. It was worth the hour trip on gravel roads.

We did meet two families there – but only two. It is august, so not quite high season in these north woods, and yet up here summer is only 2 ½ short months. Any other time frosts can come and kill all your flowers and attempts at gardening. Only two families. To wondour at the dragonflies.. I wondour if they saw them too from the top of that enchanted waterfall – darting back and forth, round and round, making our day blissful as the warm, but not hot sun, warmed our bones after our many collapsing falls into the depths?

These simple pleasures; it seems that so few people, at least in North America, get a kick out of them. After a week at crowded, but lovely, Cape Cod; filled with its shops and restaurants and hotels and parking lots it is shocking to be almost alone.

In the silence. Almost alone – except for a family or two and our soul's companions – sky, wood and water – those elemental being from whom we came and to whom we return. They are our family, they are our best friends and they speak to us all, if we could but listen and hear, in so many languages.

Today, the language I understood them speak was dragonfly, a beautiful darting dainty language who, fortunately, I heard today.

And I am grateful.

Thank your dragonflies, thank you forest and stream and lake and sky – my family up here in the north woods.