There are so many things to talk about. Good things. Bad things. Things. We should work our way back into this gently. So let’s just talk about last night.
We stood in the dark under a nearly full moon, the dogs and I. There was someone running on the middle school track in the distance. And behind us, the guys playing soccer in the dim light of the elementary school track were still at it, their booming music barely audible now.
I looked down at the dogs, my headlamp shining on the grass in front of me as I tilted my head. There was some kind of visual trickery going on, because it looked as if there was fog about my feet. I looked again.
And now, as my brain filtered out the idea of fog, the grass seemed to be playing depth tricks. Some kind of hologram-like shimmering of the longish blades of grass alternately seeming to be very deep and then shallow. My brain couldn’t lock on to whatever it was that was playing this trick — kinda like when a printed page in front of you briefly seems three-dimensional, and then all the sudden your brain fixes on the flatness of it, and the depth snaps out of existence. Except this depth didn’t snap. It just kept flipping between near and far, shallow and deep. So I looked closer.
This was some kind of wild grass, with stalks with triple seedheaded inflorescences. I don’t know my grasses. I don’t even know the parts of the grass plants. I just throw big words around as if I know what I’m talking about. But as I looked at these … inflorescences, there were tiny, bright orange lights at the tip of each seedhead.
What? I’m thinking to myself. I look again.
Yep. Tiny, bright orange lights. Unmistakeable, even though their brightness blinks out after my light shines on them for a second.
What!? I bend over to look more closely. And now I see it.
When each tiny, bright orange light blinks out, a moth ascends from the tip of the seedhead. The moths are watching me.
There’s another tiny, bright light. And there’s another moth flying off. We look around us (because you know the dogs are all about inspecting nature close-up). There is a host, a legion, a fluttering fury of moths rising up all around us.
They swirl about us as we begin to make our way back home, each foot step disturbing a new wave of them, their tiny lights blinking out just as they take off.
…And there you have it. Last night.