Blue Arcadia: Smoke in the Plumbago

Blue Arcadia 17th Jan 2009
Today a shroud of smoke hangs over the suburbs.
My mother's garden is blur and blue.
The sharp edges of the garden beds and plants therein are dimmed.
Yesterday, when the black smoke was drifting over the city of Perth, and eddying with violence above King's Park where the flames seemed unstoppable, cinders and ash were falling like snow flakes into downtown Northbridge.
I say like snow flakes because several years ago, while in Prague, I had my very first experience of eating snow flakes.
In Wencslav Square I took aim to a floating falling cluster of snow, and opened wide. Like a child, I played a game that I had never once thought to play.
Yesterday, I contemplated that memory, and game again.
But ash from a bushfire holds no game, but a sense of loss for what once was.
The snow flake is made in the sky, within the clouds, but ash is made through destruction and the violence of burning leaves.
But several days before this smokey event that I now describe, the garden was a vivid green and its clarity of colour and sharp edges allowed me to see, for perhaps the first time, and with an increasing interest, the bird-like world of certain insects.
I noticed, for example, a very small but very colour-full (colour-filled) insect that had a metallic green thorax and abdomen, with tiger stripes like that of a bee. Its wings were banded like the tail feathers of a white-tailed black cockatoo.
But it was its colouring, as well as its long legs that attracted most of my attention.
I took many photographs of it (forthcoming), and some of them, when the wind did not pitch it the wrong way, some of them allowed for a vivid picture of its otherwise seemingly unseen world.
I tracked this newly observed being on the Internet, and found out that it is called a long legged fly or Austrosciapus connexus.
It is a native fly and a hunter of aphids.
To me it represents one of several species of falcon-like appearance and habit that inhabits the plumbago.
It is attracted to the plumbago where it sits in close proximity to another similar specie (it might even be its mate)for are their differences between sexes...??
But this long legged fly, or green eyed metallic rainbow bodied black wing-banded winging aphid devouring carnivore catcher has left its mark on me.
Also, yesterday, I took photos of 'cabbage-moths' embracing and the day before that, I photographed a soon to be settling giant orange winged butterfly... whose name escapes me...
Their stories I am yet to describe.
All stories of wonder from what is now a blue smoke filled garden, where its creatures are flying half hidden camouflaged and hungry...