My Beloved Monarch

Ken and I went to see Guys and Dolls at the 5th Avenue Theater 2 weeks ago. While walking from the light rail station to the theater, we saw a formal dress that looked like a monarch butterfly. Then this week I found myself in Grocery Outlet and came across a "motion sensitive" monarch butterfly in a canning jar. The butterfly would respond in different ways based on how you tapped the side of the jar. Both experiences jump started a memory from my childhood archives.

In the 1970's Rogue Valley, monarch butterflies were plentiful. There was a pear orchard across from my elementary school with overgrown ditches full of milkweed, a main food source for the immature yellow and black striped caterpillar. I remembered spending hours hunting the caterpillars and putting them in canning jars with an ample supply of milkweed. The caterpillars would feast on the milkweed until induced into what we experience as an 'after-Thanksgiving' coma and then spin their green camouflaged cocoon attached at one end to one of the branches.

Just how long it took for the monarch caterpillar to begin its metamorphosis and unfold its wings eludes my adult mind, but in kid years, I am sure it was an eternity. My friends and I would take the lids off of our jars daily to get a better look at the process and fill our nostrils with the strange, earthy odor of beauty in the making. Watching nature in its wonder never got old.

In all the years since, I have not seen a real monarch except at the butterfly house in Seattle's science museum. I have heard that this gorgeous insect is endangered, but am unsure of this information. If it is not, I have not crossed paths, having lived in many places in the United States over the last 30 years. The sight of the dress and the fake butterfly in a jar made me nostalgic for the innate curiosity I had about the natural world. I wonder if my children have gathered any first hand experiences like these or have they merely gathered experience through manipulating plush and motion sensitive replicas of wiped out or soon to be wiped out species? God knows I tried, I really tried.