This is actually, again, quite a bit later, maybe hours later, when it was finally on solid ground, going somewhere. I followed it and followed it, and it kept getting darker and darker and I kept thinking, man, this might take way longer than I'd ever suspected, do I really want these photos so much?










So, because it kept falling back into the water, I decided to help it, and I'd put stones and twigs behind it to keep it on dry "land". Perhaps that was a mistake on my part. Maybe it needed all these struggles to assist it in the changes that were occurring inside, to flex whatever muscles inside the shell it was to discard. Hard to tell. The more I watched this little critter, the more I liked it. I couldn't help developing a sympathy for it, a sort of compassion. For such a small bug, so much was expected of it if it was to survive and become. Kafka came to mind, with his story of the Metamorphosis, but I couldn't remember him writing about how this change occurred. It seems to me that the guy just woke up one morning already a huge bug. So, it made it to the lip of the dish and fell to the ground, where it began its migration to somewhere. All the time I was trying to come to grips that here's this thing that just a while back lived in water and was now traveling on dry land. Did I remember reading of walking catfish? In Florida? Thoughts of first land dwellers coming out of water millions of years ago. Out of the "soup" where all life originated
and little by little developed. We all came out of water. At birth, "the water broke" and we began emerging into a completely different world. Didn't fall to the floor and begin to crawl away, but a drastic change of environment. As I'd already said, it was getting darker all the time, and I still did want the photos, so I put him on a piece of rubber padding and carried him to my bus, where the night light was such that I could see better what was happening. Put him up on the hood, and watched. By this time, I'd gone inside and gotten my powerful eye-glasses.
It's sort of a bummer that the photos don't coincide with the story. The photos are backwards. I never remember how to load this stuff onto the site. I guess I could delete everything and re-do it, but too many other things to do to wanna devote so much in the name of perfection.
Anyway, after I'd carried him to the bus and the night-lite, he appeared to wanna go onward. So I decided that maybe he needs a little snack. All this unusual exertion must've tired him out. So I found him a little greens and put it in front of him. Man! Was he happy!!! He practically ran to the little weed, and proceeded to climb onto it. Once there, (which took a lot of time cuz of his tiredness), he didn't do anything at all. He definitely wasn't thinking of eating, so I took him back to the pool and dunked him underwater. I don't know what drove me to do this. I thought a little moisture would revive him. Would bring him to his senses and he'd better be able to remember what it was he was trying to do. Well... Wrong again! When I brought him back to the bus he was all weird. Dead looking. His wings had began to separate from the thorax, but now, all wet, they were plastered back against his back. Boy. I felt like shit. But we stayed with it, and amazingly enough he came back around. His wings began raising, and then I noticed that he was really bloated. Somehow, he'd swollen up to twice his original size. Not his head and thorax, but his abdomen was all blimp-ed out. I couldn't believe my eyes. And he wasn't moving. Then it was that I realized that the dry shells of nymphs that had successfully gone through this change, all were in a vertical position, clinging to whatever they chose. So this guy was doing the same. He'd gotten his little greens to which he clung in a sort-of-vertical position, and movement was no longer a necessity. So I picked him up, with the rubber pad and all, and carried him inside my house where it'd be a little warmer, brighter, and I'd be able to sit down. Still no idea how long all this would take. The optimist in me thought maybe a few more hours, but the way things developed I soon realized this may take days.