A Few Things to Consider

Three centimeters long, about the size of the middle of your pinkie finger; lace-patterned gold-filigree wings, chitin hardening, new now and fragile; the female calico pennant thrusts out into air pushing back like a jet engine and she fights her way to the grass downhill, removed from the water where she could fall and drown, hidden from birds and predatory adult dragonflies and she grasps a grass stem, faces uphill toward the sun, and waits.  And waits.  And waits, before winking into the forest.

Watch her and know some of the terror and beauty of first flight.