Calligrapha beetle! 🐞

Met this elegant little friend while prepping a bed for baby lettuce. It’s an ideal time of year for small beauties, hidden colours, and tiny firsts. Bright and short wildflowers who grow close to the forest floor for extra warmth. The first bumble bees spotted on the haskap. The first dragonfly, an apparition. The early rumblings of wolf spiders in the leaf litter. Small green spikes of garlic poking up from the fall beds. Mayapples with their secret fruits. Early red mushrooms. Nodding pink blooms of hepatica, already sleeping by 7PM. Osprey swooping over the yard, fish in hand. Waiting to see the first turtle, first oriole. Taking seedlings nurtured through ice storms and power outs on day trips to the porch. Transplanting the overwintered sage back into the garden. The first farmer’s markets!

And today, defined by the suddenly blooming trilliums and a determined little phoebe scouting the best spot for her nest. Everywhere starting up its possibility engines once again. Growing up out of the duff, fueled by the decay of everything that came before. Everything that was an ‘is’ that became a ‘was’, slowly becoming an ‘is’ again.

“Our moment here is small. I am too — a worldly thing among worldly things — one part per seven billion… Mix me with soil and seed, compost for a sapling. Make my remains useful, wondrous. Let me bloom and recede, grow and decay. Let me be lovely, yet temporal…” ~Michael Kleber-Diggs