travel tales: dragonflown

a strange phenomenon occured while i was in florida:

everywhere we went, there were tons of dragonflies.

here in toronto, over the course of an entire summer, i might see a half-dozen of them, total. but there, i literally saw a dozen or more within any given hour, almost from the moment i stepped off the plane and walked across the outdoor pedestrian bridge to the parking garage at the airport on day one.

they were big and beautiful and very hard to miss. and there were so many of them.

i wondered if there was some natural-world explanation for their ubiquity, like the state had perhaps an influx due to some sort of disturbance in the food chain or something, since my previous trips to florida had always been decidedly dragonfly-free. but there was nothing on the news, and no one seemed particularly distracted by or interested in their presence or population.

yet the sheer number of dragonflies i saw was staggering... especially since, save for love bugs, there were precious few insects of any kind around anywhere in st. petersburg and tampa. no wasps. no hornets. and only the occasional meaty house fly beating itself against the windows in the office of the condo building.

i saw them every day, morning, noon and evening, no matter where we were. they were so large that spotting them was easy against a cloudless blue sky. and the last thing i glimpsed from the plane before taking off for home on my last day were a few dragonflies swooping and swirling in the grasses surrounding the runways. it was so weird.

shortly after returning to toronto, i was online and chatting with a friend in seattle. i told her about the dragonfly phenomenon. she immediately googled and what she found was strangely magical in that signs-from-the-universe kind of way.

depending on which source you choose to believe, the presence of dragonflies can signify change, or represent renewal and rebirth, or symbolize love and hope and strength, or serve as a reminder to attend to one’s innermost thoughts and desires.

i suddenly felt all warm and fuzzy inside about having witnessed (however unknowingly at the time) this profound physical manifestation of my internal experience on my holiday. it was like a colourful, poetic cosmic wink sent in my direction.

but the most bizarre, goosebump-inducing part of this story happened for me a few days after i got home.

i was on the phone with young beatrix, who’s in florida now, having assumed my spot at the condo. after chatting about the weather and the beach and target popcorn, i asked her what she thought of all the dragonflies.

and she said she hadn’t seen any.