I was on the path where I always find flowers—especially columbines that cover the hillside in June—but today I was looking for one I hoped I wouldn’t find. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked so closely because when I put my head down there it was: the blue gentian—the last flower of the season (below).
This is the time when I can feel the earth tilt. The light is less intense; the days are shorter and nights cooler. The sun is setting behind Mount Meeker at 7; gone are the long slow summer nights that I took for granted. At night the temperatures are in the 40s. Suddenly everything feels different: we‘re going in the opposite direction, downhill toward fall.
In two weeks, the hummingbirds will leave, right on schedule, around the beginning of September. Shortly after that, the ground squirrels and chipmunks will nestle into their burrows for the winter. I’ve been enjoying their antics all summer, especially the young ones who boldly approach me when I come outside, staring at me, trying to figure out who is this huge foreign species who occasionally throws out vegetable and fruit remains.
There’s a sense of emptiness on my walks. The flowers that are still blooming look frayed and tired. We had a month of almost no precipitation, and the plants in front of my cabin–green-gray sagebrush, yellow gumweed, sulfur flowers—only grew this summer to half the size they usually do. About two weeks ago, I noticed the leaves on many starting to curl up. The heat hasn’t helped—80 degree days aren’t normal here, but then 100 degree days in the valley aren’t either.
The tiny raspberries are partly dried, although there’s enough for me to take a small bite. On the gallardia, one of the flashiest flowers here, the yellow petals are drooping over the orange seedheads, almost the last piece of color, jutting out somewhat defiantly among the fading flowers. The purple asters are still blooming, although they’re on their last stages. And I admire the persistence of the purple harebells (right), which, despite their seeming fragility, have been flowering since July, through the heat, the rains and the cold nights.
But the pond (top and left) is still full, and, most gloriously, it’s covered with dragonflies—stick-like blue bodies with glistening bronze wings. I watch them swoop across the pond and then hover, long enough for me to try to get a photo, before they jet off again.
What’s the reason for their flights? I know mating is going on, but it took me a while to see that they were laying eggs in the grasses around the pond. These larvae can live up to two years in the water before emerging as adults, which will then only live another few weeks to months. Then the life cycle begins again.
As with most of nature, and humanity, too I wonder why. Why bother? What urge is in these fragile insects that keeps them doing this strange life cycle? It’s the same urge that will send hummingbird 1,000 miles to their winter homes in Mexico. The same cycle that ushers in fall and then winter and back to spring. The one that keeps life rolling along. Do any of us know why?