my hands, too, have veins and capillaries and are starting to feel stiff when it gets cold. i need to be careful about this still blog project. sure i want to enter into the world of nature. but only up to a point. evergreen sure. but deciduous, not so much. i don’t want my extremities to begin falling off seasonally.

red oak leaf

saint paul, minnesota

aside from making beautiful stained-glass windows, dragonfly wings are made of chitin, which is of all things a carbohydrate, and its strength and flexibility make it an ideal surgical thread. yes, those stitches that dissolve and don’t need to be removed? dragonfly wings. i don’t need to learn anything more today. that’s good enough.

assorted dragonfly wings

saint paul, minnesota

whatever it was that first brought insects into being, i cannot imagine it required as much concentration and care as was lavished on these more recent addtions to the phylum arthropoda.

bugs assembled from bits of nature

from the eleven year old imagination of joseph hoffman