The moths in the morning

An original literary non-fiction-style account of attending a garden group’s morning moth-viewing session.

The invitation had said that the moth box would be opened at eight. I arrived expecting something pale and frantic. On the lawn, a woman called Jo had set a shallow tray beside a large box. Three people stood around it holding cups. They looked less like an audience awaiting a revelation than neighbours who had happened to meet early.

Jo lifted an egg carton from the box. Along one ridge sat a moth the colour of dry bark. I could see it only after she pointed. Its wings lay close against its body, and a dark mark divided them unevenly. On another carton, something cream-coloured carried a row of tiny spots. Neither creature made the urgent movement I had expected.

Jo asked us to notice shapes before looking for names. A child described one pair of wings as a folded raincoat. Her grandfather said he thought it looked more like a scrap of carpet. Jo turned the carton a little, allowing both comparisons to remain possible. When she did give a name, she said it quietly and waited while we looked again.

The lawn was wet enough to darken the toes of my shoes. Beyond the fence, someone started a car. Beside the tray, time seemed to have acquired a smaller scale. A slight adjustment of a wing was enough to interrupt a sentence. I had begun the morning waiting for the moths to do something. By the time Jo carried the cartons towards the sheltered hedge, I had become interested in how much they were already doing by remaining almost still.

I left with no photograph I could have called striking. For the rest of the walk, however, I kept noticing patches of bark which I would normally have passed without looking.

How does the writer present the experience of looking at the moths?