Today I awoke in a hammock, after my room mates' dog browned up my bed-sheets with some hideous musty dog goo. I let the her outside and saw that the air was full of smoke for some reason and figured that the neighbors were burning snow tires, or something equally incomprehensible but apparently reasonable to those living their whole lives on a dirt road in Vermont.
When I drove to town I saw that the smoke extended for miles both North and South on the highway, filling the Connecticut river valley, even obscuring the tops of the what passes for mountains in the northeast. Then I remembered Memorial Day and thought MAYBE this was a sign of the greatest Mass Grilling in history. Or maybe graduation related and someone finally torched the Baker Berry Library at Dartmouth. Sadly, neither is the case, and apparently this is, as the local weather people put it "HAZE."
Anyway, as i walked into school I saw this gigantic fuzzy not-moving thing that turned out to be the biggest and most elaborately patterned moth that I've ever seen, just lying near this loading dock behind the med school like it made perfect sense. I brought it inside to take a picture and realized that their was something poetic in the image of a huge, strangely beautiful, dead moth. And being too lazy to write something of my own, I suspected that if any poet had ever mused cleverly over a moth that Emily Dickinson would be that person. 3 seconds on Google and. Oila', poem number 841:
"
A Moth the hue of this
Haunts Candles in Brazil.
Nature's Experience would make
Our Reddest Second pale.
Nature is fond, I sometimes think,
Of Trinkets, as a Girl. "
Exactly what I was thinking. But said with much less profanity. Thanks ED!
And now, somehow, it's 5 pm. Either this strange memorial day in 2010 is coincidently the Haziest, Mothiest, and Fastest Moving day of my life, or something sinister is afoot. The latter is much more interesting an option.
