DEBORAH CORRAO / L’Observateur / July 31, 1999

One of the most vivid memories I have of summertime from my childhood (besides my grandmother’s fresh-squeezed lemonade served up in an icy cold pitcher) is walking out the back door into a sea of dragonflies.

Dragonflies, or “mosquito hawks” as we called them, in a rainbow of colors and sizes, swarmed in our yard throughout the summer months, delighting all of us children and probably more than a few grownups.

Where have all the dragonflies gone? Yes, I still see a few around my yard, mostly blue or green, and not nearly the size of the giant golden insects that poised daintily on the clothesline or a long stalk of unmown grass.

I don’t see the bright orange ones anymore with their shifting bubble eyes that caught our movements before we could sneak up on them and capture them with our clumsy children’s fingers.

The dragonflies, probably the victims of mosquito control, are part of the magic that separates the children from the grownups. They were part ofthe time when we believed everything could come true if you thought hard enough or recited the right spell.

It was a time of black cats and wishing wells and special places in the woods that only we knew about. A time of clubhouses and secrethandshakes and walking down the railroad tracks to collect giant turtles sunning themselves near the shiny steel rails.

Of bare feet and juicy blackberries plucked from between the briars. Thelittle green worms inside the blackberries we ate and didn’t know about.

Sneaking down to the banks of the river and testing our courage on the water’s edge, our mother’s warnings about the undertow inhibiting us from venturing further than a few feet.

Maybe ours was the last generation that could get lost so easily in those innocent childhood games. By the time I had my own children, theinnocence was gone. We couldn’t let our children roam carefree throughthe world the way we had done a generation earlier.

Television sets and video games became substitutes for treehouses and magic spells.

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