The Magic in Metamorphosis
It takes a unit in first-grade science for her to learn the magic in what she’d previously thought were only little striped worms.
They’re not worms at all, her teacher explains, but caterpillars. Given time and proper conditions, they’ll become monarch butterflies.
She knows about butterflies because butterflies are beautiful, colorful, full of fun. But to get that she must first find one of those caterpillars. Everyone in her class must. Must get a tupperware they can poke holes in the lid of, drop sticks and grass in, and find a tenant for. They’ll raise monarchs, eyes on every part of the process, and release them on the playground when the transformation is complete.
In a Minnesota backyard, she has no trouble securing her small charge, though she needs help identifying its food. An adult is on-hand, a mother with a green thumb, who points out, at the edge of the alfalfa field, the leaves she—her future butterfly—needs.
“It’s good we have so much milkweed here.”
“Yes,” she readily agrees, “for the caterpillar!”
Another lesson is waiting for her: “And it’s good for us, too. Oh, not to eat but to tell us that all is well here. Milkweed will not grow where the soil is not rich and healthy. Good land gives you butterfly food.”
That’s a happy thought. She likes it, likes the idea that her backyard is a paradise for the monarchs. She may not know what makes the land good, what keeps the soil rich, but she likes those words. Puts images in her head of gold and treasure buried beneath the grass.
She raises that caterpillar with diligent if impatient care. Wings of orange and black are always on her mind, during the days of no change, only stripes. Days of a quiet, green chrysalis. Then especially on the day she must release her butterfly, watch it flutter off into the blue sky, and the orange leaves her life like it’d never been there in the first place.
They must fly south, her teacher also explains, They need warmth for the winter.
Away they go, to a place she imagines must always see sunshine and vacations and ice cream because that’s what warm weather means to her.
It takes growing out of her butterfly phase, of her pigtails and innocent fascination and willingness to search for stripes outside, for her to become disenchanted with this idea of nature’s transformation. Because she’s grown, changed, and so has her environment around her. Where is the mother with the green thumb these days? Where is the milkweed to remind her this land she was raised on is good?
There is no teacher, no adult with a happy lesson. These things were only for a girl she’s lost sight of. A girl as gone as the blip of orange in the sky. Where does the girl she is now go for warmth, though?
It takes the eyes, the small hands, of her own daughter to reacquaint her with that lost magic. To be in awe, as never before, with the metamorphosis of a life she’d previously never imagined could be this beautiful and bright.
“Mama, look! A worm!”
She smiles at the transformation of childhood and scans the edge of the yard for milkweed.