Dee came by to hang out with me last week.
He was pretty cool. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t particularly want anything. He just wanted to hang out with me for a while and I appreciated that.
Dee is what we commonly call a mosquito hawk, but I found out I was wrong about that. Dee is actually a dragonfly and he does actually eat mosquitoes, whereas mosquito hawks do not.
That is our lesson in insectology today, and I am not even sure I understood what I just said. But, my scientist brother said I was right.
I named him Dee because this is my column after all and I can write what I want.
Anyways, Dee came to hang out with me while I was mowing the grass. He gently flew in and landed on my shoulder and took a round or two with me as I whirled around the yard on our John Deere Zero Turn Radius Mower. Daddy never owned anything other than a John Deere in my lifetime.
Dee had a pair of great big green compound eyes which he rotated around on his head to get a good look at me. I understand they see a mosaic of 24,000 images, so that must have been an education for him.
My time hanging out with Dee was much better than my previous experiences with the critter and insect kingdom in recent weeks.
Those episodes include: • being attacked by an angry band of paper wasps on the back stoop of the office last week. No telling how long they had been there, but apparently, I disturbed their nest by opening the door that particular day and they took it out on me with a vengeance. I felt the jabs all the way down to my toes. Thankfully, I keep some dermatologic ointment in the console of my car, so that helped.
• an evening or two later, while I was sitting in my recliner in my living room at home something started biting me on the feet. I looked down to see an army of ants marching around on the floor. How did they get there, I asked? To answer myself, I started looking around to trace their trail on the floor and then picked up and moved the recliner. There was a large, single Cheeto the ant army was trying to hoist up on their shoulders and take back to their colony. I stopped them with Raid. The very next day, their surviving kin took revenge on me by trying to build a nest in my pair of Georgia boots I work in the garden with. I left them in the utility room to dry from the dew the morning before. They decided it was a new condo for them.
• Returning from the garden, I was startled by something in one of the boxes in my utility room. It was a baby possum— or at least a juvenile one. I thought possums, well, played possum when startled or confronted. This one did not. Instead, he bared his teeth and hissed at me. Later, he emitted a foul odor, tried his best to play dead and tried the hissing thing again. He eventually was relocated to the corn bin.
Yes, I was happy to trade in all those experiences just to have Dee hang out with me. He was so friendly.
I thought back to a happy memory of Benjamin and Breanna when they were little.
We were trying to catch a dragon fly on the front porch at Grandma’s — probably some of Dee’s ancestors. One had landed on my finger that day and the kids were impressed that Uncle Jason was the dragon fly whisperer. They wanted a dragon fly to land on their fingers, too. What ensued, however, was a loud, unproductive and unsuccessful chase of the dragon fly all over the porch. Poor dragon fly. All he could see was a 48,000 image mosaic of Benjamin and Breanna chasing him.
I had explained to Benjamin and Breanna that dragon flies eat mosquitoes, are cool to look at and are our friends.
Later, Benjamin and Breanna’s Mama, my sister, Kristie, called the kids to come inside because it was getting late and the mosquitoes would soon be after them. They were not ready to come inside, so they ran to the edge of the porch chasing the dragon fly with their fingers outstretched to provide him a landing zone and yelling, “Come back! Come back!”
I laugh out loud at the memory.
Dee hanging out with me last week was a good experience and a happy one.
As I turned to make another round in the yard Dee flew off to eat more mosquitoes and chase his dreams.
I was almost tempted to yell out after him: “Come back! Come back!”
