The House Fly

Because the country is much more their world than it is ours,  once in a while tinier types of the local wildlife feel free to invite themselves inside this homemade house of ours, though less often than you might think.  Their entry is helped along because in the construction I put up all the boards -- 95 percent of them oak -- when they were fresh from the sawmill and so could still be easily nailed,  and the house is not the tightest you've ever seen  But I don't think that tight houses are necessarily healthy houses, and in any case I was well aware before I started that that would happen, and I made various allowances for the way that, as they dried,  the boards eventually parted from each other in various fractions of half an inch.

The other night, as I was trying to set up for yet another of those strange sessions in which we voluntarily give up for a while our identities as rational beings to which we have been trying so hard to hold on to all day long, called sleep, our latest invader, a large and loud house fly, insisted on following me through the darkened rooms, maybe because wherever I went there was light.

His good instincts must have enabled him to avoid my wife, because otherwise, on noticing his presence, she would have been on his case in a flash, and she wouldn't have stopped  till he was toast.

I didn't have his best interests in mind either, but, though I could hear him only too well, I couldn't see him, not even during the frequent, short-lived periods of silence after he alighted somewhere, and I decided it was best to ignore him.

But after I finished reading and had turned out the light, I realized that I hadn't heard him for a while,  and he was nowhere to be heard  the next morning, too.

Slightly sympathetic,  I wondered what had become of that rascal.

House flies are generally seen as being one of the banes of our existence, though actually they are one of the countless marvels of Nature's handiwork.   They were named for those exceptional flight abilities that they are able to exercise under their own power --  something we would love to be able to do ourselves, though that's not in the cards any time soon, if ever.  Also, when seen extremely close up with an extra powerful lens of some sort, physically they turn out to be fantastically machined little works of art.

Among the many thousands of  screensaver pictures that I have downloaded and saved from the premier online photo site, Webshots, once in a while  I would notice just such a shot of a house fly.   Its image had been blown up to fill the frame, and all the fly's various platelets and other parts were shown in a dazzling array and variety of clearly delineated shapes and colors.

I very much want to make a stained glass picture based on that shot.   It would be easy to do, and it would look great.  But now I can't find that pic.  In the last three or four of the ten years it has been running, Webshots has purged from its archives a large percentage of the three or four pictures per day, taken by the pros, that it's been posting every day of the year for the last 10 years.  But I should still have that shot ...somewhere among the large number of backups that I have made and scattered around on my various computers, two of which are temporarily out of commission at this particular moment.

It's good to take steps not to lose anything, but as time goes by, there turns out to be a staggering number of different kinds of losses waiting to take place, and it's getting more and more impossible for me to dodge them all.