My husband and I have been traveling more in the southwest than we have previously. After realizing that we’ve lived in Flagstaff for sixteen years and have seen very little of the area, we decided to create a list of places to visit. Even so, we are still looking to visit places in Utah and New Mexico but haven’t made it to Walnut Canyon yet. A few weeks ago, we decided to get out of the snow and spend some time near Phoenix visiting anywhere we thought we might find birds and greenery. But it was butterflies that captured my attention.
We lucked out with our visit to the Desert Botanical Garden. It had opened its Mariposa (butterfly) exhibit the day before our arrival. The special outdoor enclosure hosted at least six varieties of butterflies freely floating from flower to flower. We walked among them, careful where we stepped, and watched as children gently held out their hands hoping that butterflies would land on them.
The back of the enclosure had several cases filled with butterfly cocoons and, to our surprise, recently emerged large, colorful butterflies clung to their former humble homes. I hadn’t thought about the dried green and brown husks containing such expansive beauty before and how the butterflies must have felt when they finally broke through and stretched their wings after their transformation.
Growing up in upstate New York, I considered myself a “bug girl.” Nature interested me in a different way back then. Praying mantis were abundant in our area. I used to love to hold their firm green bodies between my fingers and look at what I considered to be their alien faces. Their bodies reminded me of the fresh green beans in my grandmother’s garden. I also remember chasing tiny butterflies called skippers, brown with tiny white spots. They were fast and hard to catch. I thought nothing of capturing all kinds of bugs in containers and being surprised when they slowly died over a series of days. My father once scolded me that praying mantis were endangered and that the police might give me a fine and put me in jail if they found out I had killed another one, accidentally or not. For many years, as in, up until two years ago, I believed him.
But it wasn’t the death of the mantis or skipper butterflies that stopped my insect investigations. I stopped after I killed a monarch butterfly. My family and I were visiting our neighbor’s house for dinner and, as I often did, I got bored inside and went out to their flower garden. There I saw a monarch butterfly and thought I could sneak up on it, capture it, and somehow make friends with it. I captured it all right; by cupping my hands over it and feeling its wings beating and fluttering against my palms. After over handling it for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, it stopped fluttering. When I opened my palm, the butterfly was on its side, not moving.
My parents and the neighbors came out at that time and my neighbor marveled at “how good” I was with the butterfly. “Look at how it’s sitting on you,” she murmured to me. I nodded, choked with tears, and put the butterfly to rest on one of her red geraniums. Thankfully, no one noticed it wasn’t moving or were perhaps too afraid to say anything. I count this as one of the worst things I’ve ever done in my life, where my curiosity actually did kill another living being.
I didn’t think of the butterfly murder while I was busy fighting a war with cockroaches in different city apartments I lived in throughout my life. If you’ve ever seen something move in your periphery when you turn on a light in the kitchen at night, or opened a silverware drawer, you know exactly what I mean. In my mind, they all deserved to die. That is until my philosophy professor in graduate school asked once if we believed bugs were sentient. My classmates unilaterally declared they were not while I held my tongue. My professor looked right at me and said, “But cockroaches. When they are big enough to stare into your eyes, you have to wonder.” It was as though he was peering into my soul and found my true nature as a cockroach murderess. But maybe he just detected my guilt as I sat there contemplating the previously unconsidered life of the cockroaches in my kitchen.
Perhaps this is why when we had mice in another kitchen, we purchased humane traps. We baited them with peanut butter and released the captured mice outside. My father joked that we were probably capturing and releasing the same six mice, but eventually, the problem was solved. Or our cat solved it for us. I’ll never really know.
Driving back from our Phoenix trip, I began thinking about our yard, currently covered with more snow. I don’t see many insects, or butterflies for that matter, at our house in Flagstaff. I’ve wanted to plant a butterfly garden for years and took photographs of the different plants at the Mariposa exhibit. I know I’ll have to look at different plants for our garden zone here, but at least I have a good start at some ideas. Now as I look out at the melting snow and our chunky clumps of forest grass throughout the yard, I imagine turning the whole thing into a butterfly sanctuary filled with wildflowers. However, understanding my attention span and my commitment to being “indoorsy,” I realize that I should probably start small. Maybe just a container filled with a butterfly bush and some coneflowers. I still have a long way to go before I completely emerge as the outdoor gal I long to be. And before the insects find me a friend, not foe.
