The Last Butterfly of Summer

With all of the nonsense going on in Washington D.C. and New Jersey politics these days, I wasn’t mentally up to filling this space with more of the same – will save commentary on that for some other day.

Instead, I thought I’d share with you one of dozens of snapshots that I was lucky enough to have taken in mid-August of this year.

When we came back from our New Hampshire lakeside vacation, we encountered the damage inflicted on our neighborhood in Bridgewater after it was struck by a microburst of wind that brought down literally tons of trees. The big oak in our front yard was lucky to have survived, but it needed some major trimming to bring it back from the brink.

When the tree experts arrived and began their work, I decided to take my digital camera out to the front yard to record the event. As an unexpected bonus, I noticed the butterflies that were being attracted to our garden by the wayside.

That’s when I changed priorities and concentrated my camera on capturing images of these delightfully friendly creatures of the summer. If you’re careful, quiet, and move slowly, you can get your camera very close to a butterfly – easily two feet, even closer.

One of the startlingly revealing facts about nature is its insistence on reminding us that we are merely a part of it, despite the human tendency to think that we are its ultimate product. This is not to degrade the exponential progression of mankind or the value of the human soul, just a cautionary signal that our future is short and our task, heavy.