Finding My Way Back to Words

Between Two Languages

Some have asked when I started writing.

In my twenties, I wrote. I was drawn to philosophy and even considered entering hypokhâgne, a French preparatory program for the competitive entrance examinations to institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure. My philosophy professor encouraged me to pursue it. I was fortunate to do well academically, in both literary subjects and science. That opened doors to some of France’s most selective institutions and gave me a choice of futures to explore.

I was pragmatic. I chose a career in science because I believed it would allow me to make a living and become a self-sufficient, independent woman. Philosophy seemed to demand something else entirely: not only dedication, but exceptional brilliance. Could I sustain that? Could I withstand its demands over time? I was not sure. It intimidated me. It scared me, even. So I chose the safer path.

Then life happened. A new country. A new language.

That may have been the hardest transition. You learn a new language, lose a little of your own every day, and eventually find yourself less at home in the language you were born into, while never quite at ease in the new one. I could no longer write in French at the level I once had, while my English remained below the standard I expected of myself. I had not exchanged one culture for another. I was learning to live in the space between them, carrying deep roots in one while forming another layer of life, thought, and voice in the other.

The precision of words has always mattered deeply to me. I could communicate in English long before I felt I could truly write in it. Writing has always come more naturally to me than speaking, though. It slows my thoughts to the pace of language. It gives me time to search for the exact word, to bring an idea into focus until it says precisely what I mean. But language is not only vocabulary or grammar. There is another difficulty: culture.

French is shaped by strict linguistic rules and social conventions. They are not the same, though they inform one another. Together, they shape how we construct thought, argument, intimacy, disagreement, and even politeness, in ways that differ from American cultural expectations.

Our differences do not lie merely in the words we use. We approach subjects and life itself in fundamentally different ways. We reveal ourselves differently. We behave differently in public and in conversation. The expectations surrounding what may be said, how directly, and with how much explanation are not the same.

These cultural and linguistic rules permeate writing. They are present in rhythm, tone, humor, logic, and what a reader recognizes as sincere, elegant, persuasive, or clear. They also inform judgments of what is appropriate, educated, or well expressed.

There is no direct translation between two languages because each opens onto a different way of inhabiting the world.

I also had to find my voice in English, in a life far from the one in which I had first begun to write. That took years. Decades, really, of tentative writing, searching for the right words, and trying on narratives that never quite felt like my own.

Yet those years of moving slowly through the world, observing, reflecting, and contemplating were leading me somewhere I could not yet see. Eventually, those elements converged. My mind, my spirit, and my voice found a continuous thread. This time, there was no choosing. Only finding my place in the life that had unfolded. Besides, I have things to say.

And here I am today.

Delayed by Delight: A Bumblebee Stop 🌸

Jeff wondered why it was taking me so long to get from the car to the front door. After all, he'd seen me arrive through the window.

Sometimes it really does take me twenty minutes to get from my car to my front door, because something along the way stops me in my tracks, like this little beauty.

Twenty minutes, in this case. But look at him.

Most likely a male bumblebee (Bombus sp.). That pale, fuzzy "white beard" is one clue, and his large eyes are another. Unlike females, males don't collect pollen and lack pollen baskets on their hind legs. Rather than gathering food for the colony, they patrol the landscape in search of queens, often flying set circuits and marking them with pheromones as they go. I think he was sleeping on the job, and my approach woke him up. Sorry, friend.

As for species, I'm leaning toward Common Eastern at first glance, but Brown-belted and Two-spotted are still in the running. I'll take a closer look later.

It's encounters like this that remind me there's always something worth noticing, even on the short walk from the car to the front door. Hard not to stop and admire him, right?

📷 Bumble Bees · Bourdons (Genus Bombus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

When a Goldenrod Flower Moves with Intention 🐛

The Caterpillar in the Florets

I was inspecting the flower clusters of sweet goldenrod (Solidago odora) at Hatches Harbor, looking for galls. At this time of year, I often linger over the flowers because so much is happening at that scale. A goldenrod inflorescence is not simply a display of yellow. It is a small, crowded habitat: pollen and nectar, developing seed, insect eggs and larvae, predators, parasitoids, gall makers, and innumerable lives that find food or shelter among the florets.

Then one flower cluster moved.

Not with the larger, shared sway of wind moving through the goldenrod. This was a smaller, uneven motion, a twitch that seemed to belong to one small piece of the inflorescence. Looking closer, I realized that the “florets” were partly an animal.

I am leaning toward a camouflaged looper, perhaps the larva of the wavy-lined emerald moth (Synchlora aerata). The caterpillar itself appeared yellow beneath an extraordinary covering of borrowed goldenrod. It had clipped small pieces of its host plant and attached them to its back, making a costume from the very florets in which it fed. The result was not merely camouflage by color. It was camouflage by construction: a caterpillar becoming, in outline and texture, a loose little cluster of goldenrod flowers.

Camouflaged loopers are geometrid caterpillars, or inchworms. They are known to clip flower fragments and foliage, fastening them to raised projections on their backs with silk. Goldenrods are among their host plants.

The costume is not permanent. When the caterpillar molts, moves to a different host, or finds that its existing disguise no longer matches, it replaces the decoration. What looks from a distance like passive imitation is an ongoing behavioral practice: cutting, carrying, fastening, and replacing plant material.

By the way, I found the flower galls I was looking for, consistent with Schizomyia racemicola, the goldenrod flower gall midge. I also found a little party of three small bees, possibly Andrena species, still sleeping, clumped tightly among the goldenrod florets on another stem. Another story for another time.

I had set out to find evidence of an insect reshaping goldenrod into a cluster of galls. I found that, but I also found a caterpillar remaking its own exterior from the plant: becoming, for a while, a moving piece of flower. And the giveaway was not shape or color, but motion that did not belong to the wind.

📷 Wavy-lined emerald (Synchlora aerata) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly

A Toad in the Leaf Litter 𓆏

Small, Hidden Continuities of August

I love catching sight of a young American toad on the forest floor. It feels like a small victory. They are superbly camouflaged among leaves, soil, and moss, so finding one is never guaranteed. It is also a quiet reassurance that some things are right in the world: young toads are where they should be, doing what they should be doing at this time of year.

By early August, many young American toads have already been on land for weeks. Having left their breeding waters from mid-June onward, they move through surrounding uplands, growing rapidly, hunting small prey, and seeking cool, moist shelter. Their diet includes ants, beetles, flies, and other invertebrates small enough to manage.

My encounters also seem to reflect the landscape. In Middlesex County, I most often see American toads (Anaxyrus americanus), while on the sandy Outer Cape, I more often see Fowler’s toads (A. fowleri). Both species occur on Cape Cod and broadly across Massachusetts, so this is an observation about local habitat and encounter patterns, not a hard boundary. Fowler’s toads are associated with sandy areas near wetlands; American toads are commonly found on forest floors and in other more mesic settings.

The forest floor is not an easy place for a small toad. Young toads face snakes, birds, and mammals, as well as hazards from road crossings, habitat loss, pollution, and disease. Their defensive skin secretions may deter some predators, but camouflage, stillness, and the availability of moist cover remain essential.

So when I catch that slight movement in the leaf litter and realize it is a young toad, I feel grateful for the small, hidden continuities of August.

🔎︎ More about American toads

→ Powell, Robert, Roger Conant, and Joseph T. Collins. Peterson Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern and Central North America. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

→ Raithel, Christopher J. Amphibians of Rhode Island. Rhode Island Division of Fish and Wildlife, 2019.

→ Wells, Kentwood D. The Ecology and Behavior of Amphibians. University of Chicago Press, 2007. 

📷 American Toad · Crapaud d'Amérique (Anaxyrus americanus) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly.

Bachelor Sleepovers in a False Sunflower 🌻

Two Long‑horned Bees and Their Shared Flower Bed

Yesterday evening, during my nightly round of the garden, I stopped to check a false sunflower where I had spotted two long‑horned bees (of the genus Melissodes) that morning, both likely males. To my surprise, there they were again, this time sleeping head to head right at the interface between the central disk and the ray flowers, rather than at a small distance from one another as they had been the night before.  

Wedged there securely, they were gently sheltered from wind and weather by the surrounding petals and by the low position of this particular flower beneath the taller blooms around it. It is a quietly touching little sleep arrangement. Male long‑horned bees often spend the night out on vegetation or in flowers like this, because they do not have nests of their own to return to. Females, in contrast, usually sleep inside the underground nests they have dug, where they are also storing pollen for their larvae.  

It makes sense that these males sleep close to the patch of flowers they patrol and use during the day. By bedding down right in their foraging patch, they minimize energy spent searching for food the next morning, and they “know” their way back into this familiar matrix of blooms. These small bachelor sleepovers on flowers are a characteristic part of male long‑horned bee life, a small but beautiful detail in their natural history. 

I am now officially committed to stalking them, or rather checking on them evening and morning, to see how faithfully they return to this same flower and how their sleeping arrangements change over time. And so I did. This morning they were still there, sleeping longer than I do. At some point in the night, they had shifted slightly apart, a tiny rearrangement in their shared flower bed. I am smitten.

🔎︎ More about long-horned bees 

→ Vermont Atlas of Life, Long‑horned Bees (Melissodes) https://val.vtecostudies.org/projects/vtbees/melissodes 

→ Native Beeology https://nativebeeology.com/mind-your-bees-and-gardens-2/long-horned-bees

📷 Melissodes | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

One Life - Fifteen New Beginnings 🦟

At first glance, it looked like a little piece of debris. As I approached, I realized it was a beetle pupa attached to the top of a rugosa rose leaf. 

On closer inspection, I noticed some fifteen tiny parasitoid wasps, likely chalcidoids and perhaps members of the Tetrastichinae subfamily, moving deliberately over its surface. Each was only a few millimeters long, yet together they transformed what seemed like an old, dried pupa into another fascinating natural history moment.

If these wasps had just emerged from the pupa, instead of a single beetle completing its transformation, an entire brood would have begun theirs. One host had become the nursery for these minute wasps, a reminder of the intricate ecological relationships that quietly shape insect populations.

These tiny wasps are more than a curiosity. As parasitoids, their larvae develop by feeding on a single host and ultimately killing it, helping regulate herbivorous insect populations and serving as quiet biocontrol allies in gardens, fields, and wild plant communities.

It is easy to walk past little details without a second glance. But slowing down and looking closely revealed not a piece of debris, not one insect, but some fifteen, each beginning its own story.

🔎︎ More about parasitoid wasps

→ Beneficial insects - parasitoid wasps https://extension.umn.edu/beneficial-insects/parasitoid-wasps 

→ North American genera of Tetrastichinae (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) https://doi.org/10.1080/00222939400770091.

📷 Subfamily Tetrastichinae | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly. 

First Mola Mola Encounter, Oh My! 𓆝

Oh my God, what a treat! My first wild mola mola! What a fantastic fish!!! And not just one, but three! A truly grand day, made even more special by watching a group of nine or so humpbacks and a gray seal at Stellwagen Bank.

What an awesome, wonderfully strange fish: such an unusual shape, yet the largest of all bony fishes. I knew mola mola drift, but do they actually swim? I had to check.

Despite their awkward appearance, mola mola are surprisingly efficient swimmers and active foragers. During summer, they enter Stellwagen Bank in search of prey, including jellyfish, salps, squid, and small fish. They may not be fast swimmers, but they can travel long distances and make impressive dives. They move through the water using their enormous dorsal and anal fins, a remarkable adaptation for such an extraordinary fish.

Nature never stops surprising me and rewarding my curiosity.  

📷 Common Mola · Mouldouz · Poisson-Lune (Mola mola) | © Claire O'Neill, please credit accordingly