David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Going with the Flow at Public Fountains

Few things delight the eye or better serve as public focal points than water spouting fountains.  You’d expect to find them in cities, like Bridgeport, where traffic swirls around the Wheeler Fountain with its    central bronze mermaid holding an electric torch in one hand and a child in the other.  But they exist in small towns like Norfolk where, at a corner of the town green, a granite column topped by a globe balancing three fish also sports a lion’s head pouring water into a basin.

Since Roman times, public fountains have been sources of pride symbolizing healing, purity, peace, and civilization itself.  At one time designed for the practical purposes of furnishing water for travelers and their animals and later automobiles, today they highlight a community’s artistic exuberance or memorialize people and events.  Regardless, moving water still mesmerizes the senses with sparkle, trickling sound, and dewy smells.

The River's Pulse: Fifty-Two Haiku Weeks Along the Farmington (part 6: August)

August

boys swinging on frayed
rope drop to icy baptism
summer’s glass broken

kingfishers cackle
while winging down the river
silence closes in

shoes and tires and cups
caught in eddies with lumber
stuff of other lives

water striders glide
through a film of liquid light
steps in unknown dreams

hidden voices scratch
warning into night’s quiet
katydids echo

A couple blocks from my home, the Farmington River is the largest tributary of the Connecticut.  From Tinker's Damn, Homebound Publications, 2013,http://homeboundpublications.com/store/books/tinkers-damn/

Chasing Butterflies

Call it a butterfly reunion.  A few weeks ago, just like every July, I chased butterflies with my friend Jay Kaplan, a keen eyed naturalist and director of Canton, Connecticut’s Roaring Brook Nature Center.   Armed with nets, field guides, and unbridled enthusiasm, we joined several others in visiting our regular circuit of meadows, woods, farm pastures and hay lots, streamsides, power line rights-of-way, and fields as part of the North American Butterfly Association’s (NABA) annual butterfly count.  It’s a mix of childlike joy and scientific pursuit.

As usual, we started at Nod Brook Wildlife Management Area in nearby Simsbury, not because we’re certain butterflies will be present at any particular time, but for the same reason butterflies go there—for the flowers.  Searching for butterflies is actually a quest for the right vegetation.  Butterflies are attracted to certain blooms or even the sap of trees upon which they feed.  Sun, warmth, and blossoms are a sure recipe for locating them.  Although we got there a bit too early to find many of the colorful insects flying in the cool air and heavy dew, the broad grassy meadows, ponds, and weedy wetlands grow an abundant buffet of milkweed, red and white clover, buttonbush, sneezeweed and other nectar producing delicacies that almost always reveal a surprise.  We found a few pearl crescents and cabbage whites among others, but on our way out Jay braked the car hard when we spied a red admiral enjoying some moisture on the damp dirt road.  It’s a dark winged creature with red bands and white spots.