copyrighted for posterity if nothing else

"As a child she had keenly examined movement and life, expended by ants, bats, dragonflies, plants and trees. She had inherited the English love of the earth. The soil and its teeming life was a source of constant wonder to her and she had spent hours sitting silently in the April dampened earth, still as a lake. The frozen insects, earwigs startled, had dismissed her interruption and continued busily around her, climbing on the roots and branches of her calves and thighs. Armies building castles and establishments, enthroning and dethroning, followed by funereal processions of ants, black and red against the sludge green of the earth. Fortresses on promontories painstakingly constructed, futile efforts only to be ravaged by the helicopter drone of a bee, and blitzes by kamikaze dragonflies. Tiger moths, emblazoned with stripes of gold and camouflaged brown, hurling themselves with concentrated fury against the slender flickering candle flame of her night light. Those had been the first victims of her magnesium arrests. Her nose to the ground, eye to eye with snails. She imagined she could see their expressions, caught in the headlights. Herself as a goddess, haughty, only watching until the whim of destruction led her to exhale and blow. "