One ritual that always grounds me and limbers up my imagination is walking to the nearest park or green space to hunt for butterflies. It is my long goodbye to summer. In just a few weeks, this will start to disappear…
Eastern Comma
A flash of bright orange caught my eye. My brain assumed “monarch” or “wounded painted lady.” On closer inspection, it was something shyer, lone-ranging: an Eastern Comma.
It doesn’t visit flowers but likes fermented fruit, sap, dung, hops. For the short time it is alive, it wants some solitude; it will fight other commas for that right.
Comma: from the Greek komma, “clause” or “a piece cut off.” In language, it is a piece of a sentence sequestered from the rest for emphasis, clarity. On its own.
Stringing Pearls
Behold the salt marsh moth or acrea moth. She has many names.
On a windy day, she clings to the shadowy granite of the Nebraska Capitol, sewing a clutch of eggs, delicate pearls on a thread.
Pearls will become caterpillars and caterpillars will make for the trees to eat and rest and spin their houses. Where will she be, then? A whisper in the wind.
Milkweed Summer (monarch caterpillar)
The world is heat and milkweed. Leaves, stems, petals, but not nectar. Not yet. Not until wings.
There is no time for anything but to eat, eat, eat and spin. Eat, then spin. In that order. And when the spin and the silk comes… to disappear inside it.
What comes after has the wings and all the nectar and the flight.
Survivors
Buckeye and painted lady. They fly with tattered sails, scars from their airborne scuffle with a bigger winged thing. A jay? A nuthatch? A chickadee? They couldn’t say. It happened so fast. Wings mean freedom, but also peril. They are borrowing time in an ephemeral world. But they always return.
🦋
Eastern Comma Photo by Thomas Elliott on Unsplash