Now that snow has finally fallen in good quantity to hydrate land and still dormant plants, I'm looking forward to spring and summer. June, 2016 was a good year for swallowtail butterflies. Hawk moths and wooly bears boomed in long wetness of 2015. No telling what it will be this year.
Anticipation of events yet to unfold are becoming central to life now. Memories of experiences past are still important, but memories are messy things–and rightly so, to maximize feelings associated to them. When I was younger I would hyperfocus on events, especially the ones which were my own. The ones no one else knew about. The day the swallowtails arrived last June, I dashed about shooting photos of as many as I could until managing to snap the one here. No one else was in the meadow that morning except me and wild creatures. A simple, superb experience.
Such secret, private events stick hard and fast in the mind, providing high-impact entertainment upon recall, especially when recalled unbidden by some cognitive trigger (like an associated fragrance or musical passage). Flashback into those memories are sweetest of all.
