My One and Only Monarch
Wendy and I were standing in her driveway when I saw a monarch in the air above us. I had stopped at her place to pick up a hard copy of the Sunday paper that she’d saved for me because my picture had been in it. The butterfly interrupted our conversation, otherworldly in its brand new black and orange, mesmerizing in its haphazard, seemingly unhurried flight. I wondered aloud if it were a he or she, if maybe it could even be the one that came out of the chrysalis in my yard, That chrysalis that had been dangling like a green jewel case from an upturned clay pot in my garden. I’d been keeping track of it for ten days at least; I’d placed a small portable table over the entire pot during the days of heavy rain we’d had last weekend. Over a decade ago I’d witnessed metamorphosis inside a butterfly net habitat my husband had rigged up for his second grade class to observe, and I’d been trying to remember what signs to look for that emergence was about to happen. Then two mornings ago I’d found the chrysalis hanging open, translucent, empty. There was no sign nearby of its contents. It wasn’t until the next day, last evening, that I saw the large and brilliant newborn pumping up its wings in the weeds very near the pot that had held its chrysalis. Where had it been for the past twenty-four hours? More than that I wondered if it would make it through the next twenty-four hours, since a cold front was coming with temperatures likely to get into the forties. It was late this morning before I remembered to look, but there he or she was, wings more open, but still so tentative and hesitant in their back and forth, and still the body hanging mostly upside down. I bent in close to remove a couple of weeds and a dead stalk of something that seemed in the way of its exercise. Would he/she make it into the sky today? I have to admit I was not optimistic. The answer had still been “not yet” when I drove off to Wendy’s, a welcome chance to see another human with only air between us (in these Covid times), now here we were rendered speechless and craning our necks to keep watching this amazing creature…. Continue reading