Just this morning I was walking around my yard.

It's a mango season here in Florida, and I have 14 mango trees that I am good friends with.

And so I was checking out the mango trees and out of the corner of my eye, right at eye level,

there was this momentary blur of blue.

And it took me a minute to find where it landed. There was this momentary blur of blue.

And it took me a minute to find where it landed.

It was a dragonfly.

It was sitting still on a leaf right at my eye level.

And it just seldom that I see a dragonfly sitting still long enough for me to possibly see it up close.

I walked up close and I got within literally like three or four inches of it with my face.

I wondered what I must have looked like to its little bulbous eyes as this monstrous creature staring at it.

But it seemed calm in my presence and I just got to study it and look at it and enjoy it.

I later looked it up online and it was called a blue dasher, which just seems to me like

a great name for anything, especially a dragonfly.

And I thought, here I am, I'm 65 years old,

and today was my very first encounter with a blue dasher, at least an eye-to-eye encounter,

where I noticed it enough to wonder what its name was, wonder, wonder about it. And I think

about how many things in life are like that, you know, even

when you live to my ripe old age, you just realize there is so much that I missed up until

this point of my life and so much more to explore and maybe even risk an encounter with. One of my

great loves in life is birds and, you know, people who like birds don't like to be called bird watchers.

They prefer the term birders, but you think about that word bird watcher.

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