Last Dance

In which we celebrate and remember the Dancing Girls, those colorful divas from sweet summer days gone by.

The Dancing Girls made their first appearance in these pages in late July of last year. I had been admiring the fuchsia blooms and marveling at how much they resembled ballerinas in pretty pink skirts, when I suddenly decided that they absolutely must become characters in my little skits of whimsy. And so I photographed them riding on the backs of dinosaurs.

The Dancing Girls have appeared more than a half-dozen times since then. After taming the jeweled stag (a fancy little cloisonné deer I bought in a favorite store in Atlantic City, along with a cloisonné dragonfly and praying mantis that have not yet graced these pages), one or more Dancing Girls were often pictured riding the jeweled stag.

Since then, the Dancing Girls and the jeweled stag (and the crittergators too, of course!) have found a magic ring and done battle against a blue, fire-breathing dragon. These are just a few of their adventures: for every one you've seen here, they've had a half-dozen more off-screen.

I had been saving this year's fuchsia plant this fall, tucking it under a table on the front porch on cold nights, hoping to fit in just one more Dancing Girls photo shoot. But alas, I was not paying close enough attention one night last week, and a hard frost took their plant on the front porch steps where it sat.

On this Sunday, I was finally home in daylight long enough to do some yard clean-up. I trimmed up the dead plants in the butterfly garden and reluctantly dumped out the remains of the fuchsia plant along the edge of the woods, whispering a sad farewell to the Dancing Girls. I did consider one last photo shoot with the remaining blooms, but the girls would not have wanted that, in the condition they were in. (Divas, those gals - even unto the end.)

And so I saved the little tag from their fuchsia plant and brought it inside, and we did a tiny photo shoot with that instead. We felt sad about the whole thing, of course. For saying goodbye is never easy, and we will miss them (perhaps nobody more so than the jeweled stag, for once you have been tamed . . . well, we'll let the Little Prince's fox explain all of that).

On this day, we celebrate our Dancing Girls, and we speak words of gratitude for their lives. With a smile, we remember the beauty and grace and joy they brought us. We are sorry to see their dancing days come to an end. And of course, we could have missed the pain of farewell, by choosing not to love them in the first place . . . but then we would have missed the dance.

The soundtrack: Garth Brooks, The Dance.