Remembering when

There are always certain acts as a child that seem to get lost in the whole of being an adult. Occassionally, as an adult, when you encounter these acts, you stop and smile remembering when times were simplier and there were no worries. This happened to me recently and the feeling lasted for a couple of weeks.

While out for a hike through my favorite nature park, I can upon a stand of Common Milk Weed plants. In fact a stand is what it was with many plants, each with stalks as thick as your thumb and leaves the size of hands. Something caught my eye under one of the leaves facing trail side.


There worked a large Monarch caterpillar munching away at the Milk Weed leaves. Immediately I was transported back in time to when, as a boy, Monarchs were as common as robins and every summer they'd be collected into mason jars with holes nailed into the jar tops. Every day, Milk Weed would be collected as the ravenous caterpillars ate their way through leaf after leaf. With their striped suits of black, yellow, and white, they grew larger right before eyes - each time going into a kind of stupor only to emerge slightly larger each time.

And in a matter of just a few days the growing would stop and the caterpillar would seek its refuge to make its final change. Seeking a protection location under a leaf or on a bent stalk, the caterpillar would spin a small web to attach its tail, hanging upside down in a "J" shaped hook. With gyrations and wiggles it would hang until its skin split one last time and emerging was not another simply larger caterpillar, but instead the creature that emerged looked nothing like its ancestor. In place of the black, yellow, and white striped creature now hung a different creature:

An eerie green almost waxy structure hung motionless where the caterpillar once was. The edges of its top outlined in black with jewels of gold that also speckled parts of the orb. The caterpillar had become a chrysalis: That somewhat "teenager" stage that butterflies and moths go through. Unlike human teenagers, these remain motionless and still on the outside. But like our teenagers, the insides become a swirling mass of ooze and a soup of life that will slow and gradual disolve away the body of the caterpillar and reconstitute into the body of an adult butterfly. The mysteries of what happens inside this protective shell are unknown and remain one of nature's true enigma. For two weeks or so the orb hangs in its protected location, not being affected by heat, cool, wind, or rain.

It waits until that day when all of the changing is done and the adult is ready to emerge. In the days that proceed, the opaque, jade colored orb begins to clear and slowly, over the next few days it continues to become clearer and clearer until the day of the hatch. That morning, in the early light of sunrise, the once clouded orb is now a clear drop revealing the adult hidden away inside. As the drop warms, the adult begins to stir and with a sudden burst of energy the once jade cell splits from bottom to top revealling the adult that somehow was transformed from the caterpillar of days gone by.

When first released, the adult butterfly wings are crumpled and folded upon themselves, but with each beat of its primitive heart, the wings expand:

After an hour or two of resting and inflating their wings, the adults will rest one last time for the remainder of their life will be dedicated to gather just enough nectar to reproduce and begin again the circle of life that all began with a caterpillar found both today and many years ago in my youth.