Taken for Granted

It looked like a festival: Black swallowtails in the ironweed! Five or six elegant Papilio polyxenes  flying around, alighting, three or four on the same flower head, raising and lowering their blue-tinged wings. I ran for my camera. Of the 60 photos I took, none captured the spirit. Determined to get a photo of not just one butterfly but a bunch, I marched back to the meadow and clicked and tweaked and refocused as butterflies flew out of the frame as if teasing me, or vanished, or landed on other plants. Darn! Well, I was just going to stand there until I got my picture! I wanted that picture!

And then God said to me, "You will get that picture when I grant it."

Oh, I said, and relaxed. And took 219 pictures. Here is the one I think does it.

I guess I will get what I want when God grants it.

Black Blue Butterfly

Trying to ID this butterfly for you, I googled "black butterfly," "black with blue," "black with iridescent blue," and more. For crying out loud, it's not considered black or blue -- it's a "Red-Spotted Purple" butterfly, Liminitis arthemis astyanax. About 3.5 inches across. Photographed today in Gray Summit, Missouri. Quite common in the Mississippi Valley -- and to the east. But the feeling it gave me was not at all common!