I guided my bike down a bushy, stingy, squeezed path leading to a dead end alive with tangled thorns wrapped around a colony of leaves rising above my head. I had missed my chance to climb the glacier of green spanning well over one hundred yards. I spun my bike around to search for a way onto the clearing. Now off the narrow path, onto the green glittering with daffodils, speedwell, and daisies, I sought a spot where my mahogany flesh can be blasted by the day’s golden rays, all while being a roll away from an umbrella of oak branches casting a shade that shifts as the sun descends. This spot here! I think it’s fitting; a piece of peace that has been missing. Maybe here my puzzle will be momentarily restored.
Indulgent—some might call my Friday afternoon dalliance with the sun. But why define a moment of liaising with soil yielding heaped grass wafting through the crisp bluebell sky as something that needs permission, or a prerequisite to serve as a part of daily life? And what is life if we dismiss time spent with the earth as a recreational activity after the work is done? Moments like this are few for me to ever deem it too much, and even if it were more, it will never be enough. Here, on the green glaciers, on the earth, with this vista of the distant rolling and built-up lands, I hold onto the essence of life.
My eyes whizz across lines, and over the same ones twice, or thrice. Engaged, though my eyes never stay fixed on the page. It drifts off into the distance, the one right here, later, or before. Sedated by the sun, I’m acutely aware of life passing by. Barking, humming, flitting, flapping, scattering, chit chatting, to me, and with companions. A temporary disengagement from my moment of peace. Then I spotted you, my titchy companion, dotted with 16 spots! Familiar, though unordinary. Against my muddy hued backpack, I almost missed you. Against soil or the oak’s trunk, you’ll probably be missed too, unlike your blood hued dotted cousin—the poster child of your kind.
It seems you wanted to be seen. You approached unafraid, making a path of my mahogany flesh. Round and round you go, I begin to wander if you’re lost. But despite guiding you to the soil, you return to my backpack, the pages I paused for you, and back to the tip of my hand, this time trailing my index finger. Maybe you clamber out of curiosity, or are silently clamouring, because only now I’m alarmed that I have found my respite in your spot.
The ebony spots furthest from your demarcated spine mingle much like how this spot has become yours and mine. Why evolution closed those spaces between those spots is unknown, but maybe it’s so we know we must come together, as well as be apart. But us, we’ve met in this moment, probably just for this one time. A friendly encounter, I deem. I lay heavy on your patch probably destroying the place you call home.
Can we ever mingle without colliding? You, crushingly slight, and me, colossal, with mountains of possessions laying on your land. Perhaps you ascended to tell me to scurry away. Perhaps you were excited for a new terrain to discover and lay. Whatever it be, you were gentle to me.
Debris falls and someone’s home and companions are destroyed the moment we collide. Similarly, my 4mm friend finds itself in a predicament where their survival is deemed ferocious by aphids clinging to shoots and buds. They hate to see you come!
Spring has come. My flesh has felt the sun. My spotty earthy shelled friend…sorry that I claimed your spot to rest.
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The 16-Spot Ladybird Tytthaspis sedecimpunctata (Linnaeus, 1758)
The companion in this piece is no ordinary ladybird. The 16-spot is smaller, paler, and far easier to miss than its red-shelled relatives — measuring just 3 to 4mm, with a cream or buff-coloured shell and dark rounded spots that occasionally merge along its distinctive midline spine. It is the ladybird that doesn’t announce itself.
It favours grassland with hedgerows, and is often found on flowers — precisely the kind of habitat where this encounter took place. In Nottinghamshire, it is a known resident: recorded across the Eakring and Kersall area, and noted as common at Sherwood Forest Country Park. In winter, it disappears into leaf litter, waiting. A spring sighting, then, is a creature newly returned to the world.
That it approached without hesitation is perhaps less surprising than it seemed. This is a species that moves through grassland and flower heads with grace, unbothered by scale. The aphids it hunts fear its arrival. Everything else, it simply explores.
What creatures have caught you by surprise this spring?
Summer Storms
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Apr 19
It’s near impossible for me to recall the events of all thirty-eight years I’ve collided with this world. My memory: emotionally embellished more than picture perfect. Only when I lay in a field, or trail country parks for no less than the time it takes for my bladder to fill, do some lost years in the contours of my mind resurface. And if the hour gone…
A Soft Mossy Landing
What Spring Cravings Are Really Asking For
How To Return Home
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