A Sight For sore eyes

The morning sun glints off my beautiful azure wings as I flutter over Mr Jenkins' back garden. It is a neat and tidy garden, but full of cordyline and heliconia from places like Hawaii and Rhodesia. No nectar-carrying flowers in there. I flutter on to Mrs Halliwell’s garden and look around, but she has only a lawn and some border flowers from the local garden shop. No good.

Onward to Mr Samuel’s. He has a swimming pool surrounded by gravel, cement and fences. Keep going. Oh, now the next garden is a sight for sore eyes. Mr Bradbury’s garden is a potpourri of weeds, a tangle of vines, creepers and shrubs exuding a general sense of the wild. Mr Bradbury himself is a sight for sore eyes in his dinky red shorts and black singlet, kneeling, as he pots a cluster of spring onions.

I ignore him and head straight for the Little Evodia tree covered in pink blossom. So delicious. I am taking my fill when a further sight for sore eyes distracts me. The most dainty lady Ulysses butterfly I ever saw. She is at the lantana fluttering her wings, her graceful torso sways rhythmically, her long wet, tongue dipping deep inside the red and yellow flowers. She has large, dark eyes and antennae that curl up at the ends. I leave my Evodia and flutter in her direction. She sees me, but continues to feed. I wing on past her to land on a small Melicope.

As I commence feeding, she leaves the lantana and hovers over me before circling around an Ixora shrub. I leave to follow her. We rise up and, on that lazy summer morning, we happily twirl and tumble together. Over the suburban gardens we flitter, careering over Mr Wentworth’s vegetable patch at the edge of the park, and Tom Indigo’s native shrubbery. We toss and whirl in the morning sun, lost in our dreamy tango.

Eventually, she lands on a twig of honeysuckle and casts her big, dark eyes at me. I return her gaze. We are close, our stares have meaning.

After mating, she flies away.

I never saw her again. But in my mind, wheeling and whirling, flitting and floating on the morning breeze, she will forever be a sight for sore eyes.