The Journey of The Butterflies

My sister gave the kids a butterfly kit for Christmas.  They started out as teeny worms and have fattened up into big luxuriant caterpillars that just last week finished their leisurely climb to the lids of their plastic cups.  There, six weeks behind schedule, they affixed in J-shapes and formed trembling chrysalides.

Now that they were all in chrysalides, it was time for our friends to make the rough journey from our living room to the kids' preschool.  At the school, they would be moved from their shabby lids to a pop-up Butterfly Pavilion, where their metamorphosis and eventual emergence would be fittingly celebrated with the shrieks of twenty three-year-olds.  This seemed a better fate than languishing in a corner of our house, where even if they survived the inevitable battering with Nerf swords, they would surely expire when I neglected to spray them daily with sugar water "butterfly food."

So I decided to chance the tooth-jangling hayride down the most rutted stretch of the most rutted street in Berkeley with our precious cargo this morning.  With all that jostling, I was convinced that by the time we arrived, they'd all be lying limply on the floors of their cups, dead on arrival.

And one or two were shaken loose.  (When I left the classroom, one of the loosened sleepers was blindly straining his bundled self in tragic exploratory thrusts back toward the lid.)  But unbelievably, almost all of them stayed attached to the lid.  As I followed my kids across the school courtyard, I got it.  Just a glimpse.  Just for a second.

It's a miracle.

It's a miracle that a fragile, new-formed chrysalide can hang in there through a beating like that.  It's a miracle that a chrysalide in the wild can hang in there through the wind and rain and the neighborhood cat.  And it's a miracle that it hangs in there and hangs in there and that at the end of it, a flippin' butterfly comes out!  Just that one glimpse came this close to stopping me in my tracks and reducing me to a weeping, laughing mess of wonderment, like our friend the rainbow guy.

Then it was gone.