Insects, water droplets and other ephemera.
An ephemerid is an insect. To a scientist it’s a small air-breathing arthropod, to you and me: a mayfly. Picture a small translucent butterfly with three tails as fine as sewing thread and you have it.
The word ephemerid, like the insect, fluttered through time from the ancient Greek word ephermeros which was the great-great-grandparent of today’s ephemeral. If something is ephemeral it’s short-lived, transitory, fleeting.
Like a flavor on your tongue. Like a drop of water on a dry tile floor. Like an apple blossom. Like life.
An adult ephemerid spreads it’s wings for two days, no more. Imagine an entire lifetime measured out in less than 48 hours: one-hundred and seventy-two-thousand, eight-hundred seconds. Life may look like a long sentence, but you will reach the final punctuation before you know it.
So where you gonna fly today?
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.