Asakiyume mita

I've spend the last two-and-a-half days thinking about and trying to care for a butterfly who came out of its crysalis with a malformed wing. It's as if something got wrapped around the wing and pinched it. Here's the picture I took on the day I noticed it (two days ago):



That day was a sunny day and warm, a good day to enter the butterfly stage of your life and take flight. At first I thought, maybe it can pump enough fluid into that wrinkled wing to get it to unfold. But no, it couldn't.

So it was doomed. It was never going to be flying anywhere. Butterfly raising web pages told me I could make a pet out of it, or I could euthanize it (methods described, nothing awful but the concept was very depressing)--or, unstated, but clearly a choice, I could just leave it be, in which case it would die all on its own.

It was such a sunny day. This is life in the world as a butterfly, friend, I wanted to say. You can't fly, so your life is destined to be quite brief, but I hope you really love this sun. It must feel strange not to be a caterpillar anymore.

Then yesterday was rainy and cold. The butterfly hung on to its spot all day. I brought it flowers because one thing the butterfly raising pages said was you could offer a newly hatched butterfly an array of flowers. But it was too cold a day, maybe, for the butterfly to try to test out the flowers. And I don't know how long the nectar stays nectar-y after the flowers are cut.

Today is sunny (ish), and the butterfly was walking about a little. I read on the butterfly pages about making a honey-water or sugar-water mixture. Put it in a saucer and let them taste it with their feet, the page said. When they realize what it is, they will drink some, if they feel like it.

( two more butterfly pictures, with the flowers I tried tempting it with )

So I made some honey-water and held it where the butterfly could taste it, and it did taste it, and then climbed onto my hand--but when I lifted my hand, it fell fluttering off--but then gamely caught hold of a twig and started climbing up again. I tried again to interest it in the honey-water, and again it climbed onto my hand. I thought I'd carry it over to a stand of cosmos--then it could do the butterfly thing of drinking nectar, have another experience of life as a butterfly before it died. So I walked very slowly and carefully, and the butterfly sat on my hand, calm.

And then a big gust of wind came and carried it off, I don't know where. I looked around my yard, but couldn't see it. But I'm thinking, this means it even--sort of--experienced flight, a little.

I'm glad to have known this butterfly.

Meanwhile, I have a chrysalis on the siding of my house that's just about ready to hatch. I hope it will be healthy and able to fly.

My friend KM is an amazing storyteller: she can tell you something that happened to her, and her face is so animated, and her voice, that you listen enthralled, and it's like whatever the thing was, it's happening to you, too.

Last week she was telling me a story that Laurie Anderson told, a story about rescuing her twin brothers from death in an icy lake when she was eight and they were two. KM heard this story on Anderson Cooper's podcast about grief,** so when she was telling the story, I was beside myself with fear that one or both of the twins were going to die. But that didn't turn out to be where the story was going.

( Laurie Anderson's story, as told by KM )

When KM got to what Laurie Anderson's mother said, tears started streaming down my face, profound gratitude for that mother who in that moment managed to say totally the right thing to her daughter.

The story kept on reverberating for me, so I looked up the podcast and listened to it, and I have to say, KM hewed pretty close to Laurie's original, but there was an intensity in how KM told the story--or maybe partly it was our setting, in a chilly, windswept meadow, after having crossed over a swollen blackwater stream--that made it even more compelling than Laurie's original, even though it was Laurie's own story.

**The podcast is called All There Is and the episode with Laurie Anderson is called "The Release of Love." She tells the story of her brothers near the very very end. Although I am fond of Laurie Anderson, the rest of her conversation with Anderson Cooper--her thoughts on the topic of grief--left me kind of cold, but grief is a complex emotion, and I have no doubt her words could be transformative for some.

People commented at the time that Piranesi came out that you could read in it Susanna Clarke's experiences with chronic illness, and, primed for that, I can see it, but talking to the ninja girl this morning, I was thinking about it more in terms of death and rebirth (or death and afterlife), and I was thinking: it's a really a daring choice to center your story on a person after death, so to speak, a person who's in eternity.

I really viscerally disliked 17,776, another story that deals with being in eternity, but this one I viscerally loved. I think it's because of the sense of inherent meaning, work, purpose, and peace that pervades the narrator's existence in Piranesi

And even though I said that it deals with a person who's in eternity, maybe it matters/helps that actually, even though that's the sense the story gives, he actually *isn't*. He's still mortal and even thinks about his eventual death. So really it's a rebirth story. But rebirth requires death, and I'm thinking of the really painful, awful bits, where the narrator finds the scraps of Matthew Rose Sorensen's agonized, furious entries as he feels himself, essentially, dying. He's full of pain and hatred--understandable. And yet the narrator, the Child of the House, feels none of those things anymore.

I like that the story doesn't deny the suffering and yet lets the Child of the House's outlook be enduring.

For two days early last week, it was hard to turn onto the long, uphill driveway to the jail because workers were repairing--replacing, it turned out--a utility pole right at the entrance. The day they finished and cleared off, this shrine appeared by the new pole:



I've seen roadside wreaths and flowers and crosses, but the mass of candles was new to me and moved me.

I asked the officer at the lobby desk if she knew the story of it.

"Yeah, last week we were doing our outer,"** she said, "and this car came really fast, so fast--and crashed into the telephone pole. It was a boy and a girl."

"Did they both die?" I asked.

"She did. He survived. She was young," she said.

It seems like the candles have been lit, too. I wonder if someone comes by to light them each night.

**outer = outer perimeter. I hadn't realized they do this but, duh, of course they would.

Last week, on a stretch of highway between my town and the next, I hit a cat :(
I stopped and ran back to him, but though he looked completely whole, there was no life in him. He had a coat like dark clouds.

Yesterday, I was coming home in the evening on that same stretch of road, and the sky looked something like this:


(Not my photo; a manipulation of the first photo here)

--watercolor dark and light, as if last week's cat was stretched out there, relaxed, just dozing.