While all the other boys were microwaving live grasshoppers and picking off the legs of Boxelder bugs and impaling the night crawlers with fish hooks, you were the one placing the caterpillar tenderly inside the ice cream bucket’s milky white walls.
This is what I think about as your doctor looks at me over his glasses like, Woman, pull yourself together, as I bite the insides of my cheeks and step out of the white-walled room, and when the nurse asks me why I am sobbing over the sink, I do not tell her it is because I am remembering your quiet hands, and a caterpillar, and an ice cream bucket.
Neither of us understood, back then, why this caterpillar would not thrive, never mind the fact that he was held captive in an ice cream bucket, never mind the fact that he was only trying to wriggle out of his too-tight exoskeleton, which is another way of saying he was trying to grow into himself. And because he grew too slow and despondent, I threw him into the yard for the birds, shocking even myself at my own cold cruelty. How easy it was for me to turn my back on the very thing I had once promised to keep safe.
This summer, my daughter will be the age we were, then.
Just this week she asked if we could raise a monarch butterfly in one of those pop-up mesh habitats—$34.99 from Amazon, mail-order cup of caterpillars sold separately. I tell her, “We will see” because I have failed so often at keeping things alive. I tell her, “We will see” because I do not know anything anymore, least of all how many more times you and I will sit in a sterile, white room with me chewing my cheeks raw, and isn’t it all a game, really—a toss-up—me checking the ice cream bucket every morning, not understanding what else I could do to help this tender creature keep living, me, finally flinging the whole damn bucket into the yard and slamming the door?
And then there is this: The summer after the ice cream bucket. A monarch in the treehouse, limping along with a broken wing. How you tucked it under the step stool, filled a dish with water from the hose, plucked green leaves the size of your palm and left them in a neat pile.
Days later, you laughed a crooked laugh when you found him crisp and stiff from the sun. Look, you had said, a fried-up butterfly chip. But you did not fool me. I saw the way you rubbed its one broken wing between your thumb and forefinger like you were making a wish, so deep in you was the desire for this creature to go on living.
Feature photo by Sherman F. Denton via Rawpixel
Well this was just beautiful.
This is beautiful and also.... I want to know more ✨