Autumn Meadowhawks and Late Season Desires
A piece written last fall that I've finally decided to share with the world.
Though I wanted it badly, as with any honest desire I couldn’t force it into existence. It’s in the inertia of wanting that we create more resistance between have and have-not. Like the watched pot that ceases to boil, the stagnancy of anticipation consumes us. I knew I had to give way to the frictionless flow of letting things happen. Of believing this moment, as it was, was complete. I turned my attention to the scene unfolding.
For early October, the sun felt as hot as mid-July. The cattails surrounding the pond were three-quarters of the way brown, emerging from Leprechaun-green moss, then curling downward at the tips. When a slight breeze arrived through the trees, their blades moved in unison as if performing a ballet, gently arching windward and sweeping back. The dogs had given up on my lacklustre participation in throwing the ball and settled on entertaining themselves by chewing whatever was in close vicinity. I sat still in my lawn chair near the pond’s edge, absorbing the compounded sun rays that reflected off its surface. And all around me, dragonflies buzzed.
It’s in the inertia of wanting that we create more resistance between have and have-not.
It’d happened before, five years ago, in this very place. At that time, I was in a relationship that was about to end. While I tried to pretend otherwise, I knew it was coming. I never loved him, even though I said I did. Not because I wanted to deceive him, but because I wanted so badly for the search to be over. To have found my person at long last. To fit in with all my friends who had found their persons, gotten married, bought homes and started families. To tick the boxes on the checklist of a ‘successful life’. I wanted this so much that I was willing to convince myself I was in love. Of course, in denying the reality that I most definitely wasn’t, I only perpetuated the painful position of staying stuck in a toxic relationship. In the inertia of wanting love so badly, I’d planted myself in the stagnancy of have-not.
The relationship wouldn’t end for another six months, but the lead-up to its catastrophic demolition was, as one might expect, mildly dreadful. A time seeped in lurking pain and oozing frustration, like a disease that only hints at its existence through a small but troublesome boil. What I didn’t realize at that magical moment five years ago, when a dragonfly hovered down and made a graceful landing on my hand, was that nature was delivering a message: a lace-winged beacon of the sudden change to come.
Dragonflies are known as a symbol of transformation. Most of their lives are spent underwater as a nymph until one day when the conditions are just right, they decide to climb up a plant, out of the water and emerge from their final moult to begin an entirely different life of flight. It’s in that tender time of emergence from the water that they are most susceptible to predators. However, they quickly become fierce predators themselves. While they can be underwater for as long as five years, their adult life above water typically doesn’t last more than a few weeks, depending on the species.
Now here I sat, five years later, wondering if I might experience another close encounter with a dragonfly. I’d moulted a few exoskeletons of shame that engulfed me in the aftermath of that unfulfilling relationship, working through the muck of my self-abandoning tendencies. Coming to terms with the idea that while my life was not unfolding at the box-ticking pace I’d hoped for—love, tick; marriage, tick; house, tick; kids, tick— as a 41-year-old-spinster, I still had tremendous value to offer the world; even if that value was as simple as sitting by a pond in a bog, comfortably alone and at peace, not harming anything.
As I absorbed the life around me, I noticed many dragonflies were flying in tandem. The one in front was vibrant red while the one held in the back was a darker reddish brown. It looked as though the one in front was trying to shake its counterpart off, hitting it repeatedly against a blade of grass. Then another vibrant one arrived, darting in on the pair and then flying away.
Were they stuck?
Had the third one arrived to help?
Quite the opposite, I would later learn after a bit of reading. I was witnessing two male Autumn Meadowhawks (Sympetrum vicinum) fighting over a female. When a male has a female in his clutches, in an almost caveman-like fashion, he bats her against the surface of a plant or water to disperse her eggs. Dragonflies are quite primitive, after all, having remained unchanged for millions of years according to fossil records. An emblem of the notion that progress for progress’ sake is overrated.
In all this activity, I barely felt it land on me. I stared at its pulsing eyes, frozen with joy, until I accidentally flinched in my excitement and it flew away. I returned my attention to the surroundings. The trees were in prime autumn fashion. Yellowy birch and poplar, red-orange maple, maroon cherry and dogwood. The hurricane damage from last year was still evident in the many-leaning spruce. One had fallen directly beside the pond, leaving a big hole that expanded the water’s edge, making for even more ideal dragonfly breeding grounds. Many of the leaves had yet to fall, but the few that floated down landed exquisitely dispersed over the ground. All of this apparent randomness was operating in a subtle symphony, where all nature’s instruments had their perfectly timed place. Even spinsters like me. I shifted to swat a housefly off my hand, only to discover a second dragonfly on my arm. We locked eyes for a moment and then it took off.
All of this apparent randomness was operating in a subtle symphony, where all nature’s instruments had their perfectly timed place. Even spinsters like me.
A thought came to me about children. With no viable partner to latch onto and despite the geriatric condition (as medical experts would say) of my uterus, I still haven’t given up on the idea of being a mom. I have no interest in forcing this outcome through medical intervention. I very much want the partner to go with the child. But as I trudge into middle age, the angst of achieving marriage and kids has become diluted in a broader, deeper understanding of my existence. Whatever life cycle I’ve come here to live, I’m okay with it.
Shortly after this thought, a pair of dragonflies appeared on my arm. At the same time, I noticed another pair nearby that were curled into each other, in the act of fertilization, making a heart-like shape. Turning back to the pair on my arm, I watched as a little brown spec was dropped on me. Autumn is not a time of year I would typically associate with new beginnings or mating wildlife. Yet, in early October, this pond was being batted with hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny brown specs. Little nymphs-to-be.
In the late season of my reproductive years, as I mingled with these transformative creatures once again, could nature be sending another message of sudden change to come? Perhaps one more fertile than the last. Could it be that what we call a mid-life crisis is much like that tender, vulnerable time when a dragonfly leaves one life to begin an entirely different one? A time when we either succumb to the predatory fears of failures, lost youth, missed opportunities, and the ghastly plague of growing old—OR we learn to become the fierce predators of these thoughts, iridescent in our knowing, as we fly toward our golden years for however long we may.