March 12

I have seen forty seven Marches come and go. Those of my childhood are distant to me now, and my memories are sketchy at best. The months and seasons and years have stacked one on top of the other, and I am acutely aware today of such timelines or yardsticks in which we measure our lives.

While standing in the driveway this afternoon, simply listening to the birdsong and enjoying the full strength of the March sun on my face, I was surprised to see a small midge-like insect flit closely by my face. It was carried along in a gentle breeze, likely having come from the direction of the barn and headed westerly where the breeze seemed to take it.

The first insect of the year, not counting the emergent ladybugs we often get when the sunlight warms their hibernation space in a windowsill crack. No, this was an honest-to-goodness flitty bug, as we call them. An ephemeral, I suppose, meaning that today it will likely experience the entirety of its life, having emerged today from a chance egg, lain last fall on a twig that awaited just the right amount of warming sunshine.  Within today, this creature will emerge, grow, fly, attempt to find a mate, and ultimately die upon this Earth. No seasons or years that stack one after another. Just today.

As a boy growing up summers in Northern Michigan, we used to see the mayflies emerge upon the lake, often en masse, spending just a singular day or so in their adult winged form. I remember then, as I do now, how fragile life seems, how inconsequential, when the scales of time are but a blink to us.