People leave us things in our garden. A stone with a beautiful monarch butterfly painted on it was left on our street-side bench. Later, scrap wood with painted ladybugs. One summer someone gave us a hubcap with a frog decal on it and then it accumulated, all on its own, tiny frog friends in resin or plastic. They just kept showing up, one by one. Maybe it was serendipity, but they felt like Valentines.

So when I noticed, from a distance, a small metallic object on a piece of rebar I was using as a plant stake, I thought someone had gone above and beyond. This was a serious work of art. A copper-colored impossibility in the shape of a dragonfly. The filigree in the wings in particular was remarkably well done. I approached.

Well shit. No wonder. It was an actual dragonfly.

I see dragonflies fairly often in my garden, but most of them are what I think of as the military sort. They’re large and aggressively marked, with striped wing bars and a certain confident flair. I’m moved to salute them more than admire them. We don’t have any water here except in our birdbaths and those are crapped out on a daily basis by our crows, so I don’t know what any dragonflies are doing here, but here they are. Dragonflies do not have an impressively long lifespan and they are mostly interested in advancing the species during their brief stint, and that always involves water. Eggs are laid in water or real nearby. The chilluns grow up in water.

So I salute our yard dragonflies and wish them bon voyage on their way to finding a suitable wetland to party down in. I haven’t grown attached. I admire but can’t relate to an insect that large that doesn’t have to unfold its wings but just BAM elevates and puts it into reverse and zips about so effortlessly. I’m simply not in its league.

But this guy. My lord. This one was a civilian, and gorgeous beyond all reason. Its body was coppery and its wings echoed the copper theme, overcast in blue. I had never seen the like. So I looked it up. I believe it is a Flame Skimmer, reported as common. Naturally. Seeing a spectacular insect for the first time in my seventy-plus years, that is apparently common, is a standard method for serving me a proper humility in this world. How could I not have seen this?

I’m seeing it now though. Once I could leave it alone, I looked it up. The dragonfly anatomy is compelling to many people and appears frequently in art but it’s odd. There are those wide wings held out horizontally and the skinny long bit trailing behind. It looks to the uneducated eye as if that long abdomen is meant to counterbalance the wing mass so that it doesn’t just fly itself into a wad or spin in place. And that is in fact considered one of the evolutionary functions of the abdomen. But accommodations had to be made. Because when you have a super long abdomen, lots of things aren’t close to other things. Things might not line up.

Specifically, genitalia. The male dragonfly has a penis near the end of his fuselage. A fancy one, with scoops and barbs, so that it can attempt to clean out a previously visited female before she thinks about laying someone else’s eggs. But he also has an apparatus at the end that he uses to clasp a female near her head. It’s like a plug, and she has the correct socket. He jams his tail in her slot. Now she can’t go anywhere, but on the other hand his penis is not where it should be for maximal results. Fortunately he has a secondary sexual apparatus in which he has deposited sperm, over closer to his thorax. So he gets to deal with his own wet spot. And all the female has to do, if she wants, is curl her own abdomen under and put her relevant parts on the spot, and the two of them can fly around all hooked up like that in the ultimate 69, which with their anatomies looks like a heart shape. People love that romantic touch. (Never mind that our heart shape doesn’t look anything like a real heart.)

I assume most female dragonflies think this is all worthwhile, having your head commandeered like that and being flown about the pond, but in some species females have been observed to feign death to escape the attention of males. Well, sure. Who hasn’t done that? Unfortunately your own untimely demise does nothing to dissuade some of your least desirable suitors.