Joe Pye Weed grows to eight feet and spans a distance in its blooms the length of my outstretched arms. The rain and heat of these months have made it the richest spot for butterflies we have ever seen here: Buckeyes, Swallowtails Tiger and Black, Eastern Tailed Blues, Hummingbird Moths, Pearl Crescents and Monarchs. We cannot count them, there are so many, and they move from bloom to bloom to other flowers to the other two Joe Pyes. Lighter than air currents, they are liquid in their flight. On the second step of a ladder my head is among the flowers and a myriad of bees, and like a freakishly 
large church mouse I observe the etiquette of — slow slower slowest still — so as not to be noticed. I am trying to be just another stalk. In the dozens they settle and float around me. Some come to rest on a shoulder or my cap. From inches away I can watch them feed. For minutes on end, when the wind shifts and no cars are using the road and the sky is temporarily empty of planes, a quiet comes down, and in the sweeping radius of these flowers, even in this febrile month, nothing else matters. Everywhere we have walked, on trails, near water, in the lowlands and the mountains, the insects have been roaring in flight, in calls, in spiders’ webs and clouds about our heads, 
tremendous engines of life in the greater dynamism of this fecund summer.
© Mike Wall
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