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Butterflies
Mon Jul 25, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, Irish writer Chuck Kruger waxes whimsical.
For the summer of 2004 our rain gauge on Cape Clear Island, the southernmost inhabited bit of land off the coast of Ireland, totaled only 5 inches of precipitation for the months of June, July, and August, but surprisingly our garden didn’t suffer, since when it rained it was usually a drizzle, which soaks into the ground instead of running off as with a downpour, and these drizzles didn’t happen on a cluster of days but were well spaced out. While our mains water supply was cut off every night to try to help the island storage tanks gain enough water from the wells to carry us all through the next day, that proved no major inconvenience to most of us. But what I particularly enjoyed about last summer may have been partly a result of the fine temperate weather; that is, I’ve rarely seen so many different types of butterflies, nor such numbers of individual types. In August, for example, the peacocks flocked in, and throughout the summer I saw red admirals and small tortoise shells, painted ladies and large whites, small blues and speckled woods, and many more, some of which I failed to identify. What follows is one of many of my scribbles sparked off by butterfly experiences:
A Be in My Bonnet
Let a butterfly be
but a splash of light
in an apple tree
Let a baby be
but a grace note
in a symphony
And still I’ll be
thankful to have been
whether or not
there’s any laughter in
any eternity
The Weather Notebook is a program of the Mount Washington Observatory; we receive funding from Subaru of America.
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