Where the Dragons Fly

I step out into my lawn. It’s moist on my feet, and soft and springy too. It’s overgrown and teeming with life. The grass blades shimmer in the breeze and I look down between my ankles and find smallest dragonfly I’ve ever seen—no longer than an inch. His tiny red body contrasts with his bright green eyes. And his wings aren’t perpendicular to his body like other dragonflies. They fold behind his back, parallel with his slender body, and I can’t even see them when he was airborne. He is silent.

He wafts around the blades of grass sticking up among the others and bumps into a tiny beetle sunbathing at the top of a blade. He floats over to another blade and plucks an aphid from the tip, but I don’t realize it’s an aphid at first. In fact I don’t even see it cradled between his six legs. The dragonfly secures himself vertically on another blade. He pulls the aphid, which is struggling now, up to his mouth. It’s so small I can’t even see him really eating it, but it slowly disappears and wiggles in his clutches. It’s a big meal for such a little guy. The aphid probably fills his entire thorax, the segmented body part between the head and the abdomen. He discards the wings of the aphid and they flutter down through the forest of grass, down into the dirt where the dead things are. Soon the whole aphid is gone, and I can see him slurp up the last leg like a noodle of spaghetti.

You really should check out your backyard sometime. I had never known the seemingly mundane could be so exotic.