I am reading Mary Oliver's collection of essays titled Upstream. She writes with such meticulous word choice that it makes me want to write about similar subjects just to see whether or not I would be able to paint similarly beautiful tableaux. I'm transported into countrysides, where she guides me into watchful observations. From my chair in the garage studio I see foxes, ducks, turtles, trees and flowers.

Then I am startled by a fly that drops from the windowsill it was knocking against and lands with the noticeable weight of its iridescent blue body on my knee. Its exhaustion has made it sticky.

When I look up to the ceiling, there is a square-bodied spider the size of a push-pin sitting immobile next to its torn and dusty web. One of those pretty bugs with a body the shape of a teeny-tiny tear drop and antenna that curve gracefully in front of it, bumps into the spider in its meanderings. But the spider doesn't move, supposedly uninterested in this kind of bug.

Mary Oliver writes about being vegetarian by contemplating our need for food, and by extension, all animals' need for food. In one scene she describes unearthing some turtle eggs and eating them for a meal. Her descriptions create such a sense of intimacy that I worry she might see the queasiness on my face.

The bug presence in the garage sometimes makes me feel like one is caught in my hair, or crawling along my temple. I've been raised in sanitized environments. I wonder sometimes where all the nuisance bugs are in Oliver's nature rambles.