Balance of Fragile Things by Olivia Chadha Page B
Authors: Olivia Chadha
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Literature, New York, Nature, Cultural Heritage, Novel, multicultural, India, Environmental, family drama, Latvia, eco-fiction, butterflies, eco-literature, Sikh
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the year my eyes search an empty night sky for his figure, even though I know he is not there. Signs of consistency bring my mind peace.
The metamorphosis must bring the caterpillar comfort. After she consumes more than 2,700 times her weight, her tired jaws must celebrate when she hears her internal scale telling her sheâs fattened enough. Then, she casts a silken thread from her mouth, lassos a branch, flips around like a tiny acrobat, and holds the thread with her toes. Then she unzips her exoskeleton coat of caterpillar skin and exposes her hard chrysalis self underneath. Inside, during her longest rest, cells rearrange and move into different order. I wonder what it feels like to change, to truly morph like that. I wish I could rearrange into something like a grizzly bear or wolfânot a werewolf with its full moon limits but to shape-shift into something wild and strong forever, something that belongs only to nature.
I wonder if the unnamed butterfly I found earlier is endemic to Cobalt; it looks quite similar to the one I found a week ago except for the difference in color and shape on each side. It must be a part of the blue family because of the color, though itâs possible it is a copper because Iâve been wrong about identifying them before.
It reminds me of the Spring Azure I saw months ago. I was sitting atop a clump of mud near a puddle of rainwater on the path I was taking beside the Chautauqua River; I thought my eyes were tricking me. I thought a piece of bright blue sky had fallen to the ground. The sun lit its wings in a way that reflected its slightly powder-blue iridescence. It must have been a male because they tend to be flashier to the human eye than the females. I kneeled down and lay flat on the damp ground about one foot away. It couldnât have been larger than my thumbnail, wings open. As it was so consumed with its meal of salt and nutrients from the wet earth, it didnât even seem to notice my presence. We spent nearly two minutes next to each other. I could also make out its drinking straw, the proboscis. Its wings were still warming to the world as they werenât fully uncurled and were still moist from its chrysalis. I read that Spring Azures only live for a few days before they lay eggs and die. Most of us think of the life of a butterfly as only the time when they are in the adult stage, in flight. The time it lives as an egg, caterpillar, in chrysalis to pupa, should be considered its infancy. If its life was three days long, and I spent two minutes with it, then we were more than passersby, perhaps acquaintances.
It would be a shame if the nameless blue remains so. I will take it on as my special duty to find out what it was like when it was alive, so that in death, it can find peace. Iâve spent a great deal of time searching through the Internet and the limited books I have here at my fingertips, and I still havenât found what Iâm looking for. If anyone is reading this, if you have any idea what this butterfly is called, please post a comment below. Here is a brief description: one inch across the full body, maybe less, outer margins of the forewings and hind wings have a whitish fringe, the left side of the body is mostly an iridescent blue and the right side is an earthy brown, and there are white circles filled with black scattered along the post-median area of the wings. The left side has slightly sharper edges than the right. I have found butterflies that match parts of this description. Perhaps itâs a new breed Iâve found, or perhaps nature has created a freak, like me.
Please post a comment below if you know what Iâve found.
0 COMMENTS
Maija
M aija saw tiles. From behind her counter in Jones Drugs, she looked at Mrs. Eleanora Finch and saw marble, glass, porcelain, and travertine. There were so many shapes and sizes, from the smallest and most variegated used to craft classical Italian mosaics to the sapphire squares
The metamorphosis must bring the caterpillar comfort. After she consumes more than 2,700 times her weight, her tired jaws must celebrate when she hears her internal scale telling her sheâs fattened enough. Then, she casts a silken thread from her mouth, lassos a branch, flips around like a tiny acrobat, and holds the thread with her toes. Then she unzips her exoskeleton coat of caterpillar skin and exposes her hard chrysalis self underneath. Inside, during her longest rest, cells rearrange and move into different order. I wonder what it feels like to change, to truly morph like that. I wish I could rearrange into something like a grizzly bear or wolfânot a werewolf with its full moon limits but to shape-shift into something wild and strong forever, something that belongs only to nature.
I wonder if the unnamed butterfly I found earlier is endemic to Cobalt; it looks quite similar to the one I found a week ago except for the difference in color and shape on each side. It must be a part of the blue family because of the color, though itâs possible it is a copper because Iâve been wrong about identifying them before.
It reminds me of the Spring Azure I saw months ago. I was sitting atop a clump of mud near a puddle of rainwater on the path I was taking beside the Chautauqua River; I thought my eyes were tricking me. I thought a piece of bright blue sky had fallen to the ground. The sun lit its wings in a way that reflected its slightly powder-blue iridescence. It must have been a male because they tend to be flashier to the human eye than the females. I kneeled down and lay flat on the damp ground about one foot away. It couldnât have been larger than my thumbnail, wings open. As it was so consumed with its meal of salt and nutrients from the wet earth, it didnât even seem to notice my presence. We spent nearly two minutes next to each other. I could also make out its drinking straw, the proboscis. Its wings were still warming to the world as they werenât fully uncurled and were still moist from its chrysalis. I read that Spring Azures only live for a few days before they lay eggs and die. Most of us think of the life of a butterfly as only the time when they are in the adult stage, in flight. The time it lives as an egg, caterpillar, in chrysalis to pupa, should be considered its infancy. If its life was three days long, and I spent two minutes with it, then we were more than passersby, perhaps acquaintances.
It would be a shame if the nameless blue remains so. I will take it on as my special duty to find out what it was like when it was alive, so that in death, it can find peace. Iâve spent a great deal of time searching through the Internet and the limited books I have here at my fingertips, and I still havenât found what Iâm looking for. If anyone is reading this, if you have any idea what this butterfly is called, please post a comment below. Here is a brief description: one inch across the full body, maybe less, outer margins of the forewings and hind wings have a whitish fringe, the left side of the body is mostly an iridescent blue and the right side is an earthy brown, and there are white circles filled with black scattered along the post-median area of the wings. The left side has slightly sharper edges than the right. I have found butterflies that match parts of this description. Perhaps itâs a new breed Iâve found, or perhaps nature has created a freak, like me.
Please post a comment below if you know what Iâve found.
0 COMMENTS
Maija
M aija saw tiles. From behind her counter in Jones Drugs, she looked at Mrs. Eleanora Finch and saw marble, glass, porcelain, and travertine. There were so many shapes and sizes, from the smallest and most variegated used to craft classical Italian mosaics to the sapphire squares
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