Dragonflies

A dragonfly (tutubi) flitted across my windshield the other day, then another one landed on the hood of my car, struggling to stay on. It’s going to rain, I thought to myself, reaching back to a childhood belief that when dragonflies were flying low, it was going to rain. Sure enough, before I reached my destination, the raindrops started falling.

I don’t know if that bit of folk wisdom – the source of which I can no longer remember – has any actual scientific basis, having to do with atmospheric pressure or the amount of moisture in the air or how insects sense changes in the environment, but back then in what the kids today must consider the Medieval Ages when the weather bureau – this was before PAGASA was established in 1972 – usually gave wrong forecasts, I remember this to have been a pretty accurate prediction of rain. Seems like it still works.

Today, we know exactly when a storm is brewing in the Pacific, with satellites and radars tracking its progress and how it develops, and computer models showing its possible paths, enabling communities to prepare for its onslaught, even to evacuate if needed. And as storms become more powerful and more erratic and consequently more destructive, such early warning goes a long way in helping save lives and property.

Weather and nostalgia aside, I really like dragonflies (I even have a jacket embroidered with dragonflies!). As a kid I’d join my cousins and run around our compound catching them with our bare hands – I was quite good at this – then put them in a box or jar or even just a paper bag prepared with holes for ventilation and grass or leaves for them to feel at home as in a garden. At the end of the day, as dusk set in and our parents called us back home, we’d open and shake out the box or jar or bag and see all the dragonflies fly off. By the way, I have to say our casualty rate was very low, as I don’t want to raise the hackles of animal – or insect – rights activists.

I guess with computers, tablets and all kinds of gadgets to keep kids occupied these days, mundane things like catching dragonflies have gone the way of the party-line telephone and the ambulant egg vendor (we had one of these too, who came around every week with eggs in a basket and a cigarette dangling from his mouth). I asked my grown-up niece if she ever caught a dragonfly; her answer was a terse “Nope.” I asked a kid about ten years old the same question and he looked at me as if I was speaking Swahili; I have to wonder if he even knows what a dragonfly is, unless of course a character in one of his computer games takes on the form of a dragonfly. The generation gap seemed more like a chasm.

Now that I live in a building I rarely encounter dragonflies; I don’t think they can fly up to the 19th floor on their gossamer wings. So to see two of them just before the rain is something worth writing a column about.