dragonfly and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

First: I come into work in the morning and there's a pile of bee carcasses on the pavement outside my building. They were !horrors! swarming...(I think, isn't this what bees do?) And, perhaps, were filling the walls of the building with honey. Call a beekeeper instead of an exterminator, for heaven's sake!

In between that and going home, it's a general draggy day for me and everyone around me. EVIL valley allergies, pollution & global warming, no doubt.

Then: I arrive home after work and discover that a very sweet old man who lives at a shelter here who used to 'work' in my yard but has been missing for a year is back and has been working for probably 2 hours in the front yard without supervision and he doesn't know that I didn't want work done and very sweet and childlike him doesn't know that dichondra, bacopa and miniature violets are not weeds. And the vegetation that IS weeds are of a variety that Lucy eats medicinally and now they're all gone and she'll be sick. I resist (barely) heaping tears upon the heaps of torn greenery.

Though my heart was eaten by some grief, I'm getting over it today, gratefully realizing that there are some of the teeny, precious violets left. It will take time that I do not have here, in this place, to wait for the rebuilding of the (I resist writing 'my'...) vibrant and lush dichondra. But having spotted teeny weeny flying saucer divets in some of the usual bare spots in the front yard, my attention is diverted to the sparrows (finches?) who are back and enjoying their dirt baths. Ah...

photo courtesy of njminerals.org