It was a Fleeting thought at first...
My phone made a chime that I recognized. It was my daughter.
I picked it up off the counter and clicked on the messages icon, then just stood there in the kitchen looking at the text.
I read it a couple times because, at first, I wasn’t sure I understood it.
I took a sip of my coffee and stared at the question written on my phone:
"How do I preserve a monarch butterfly?"
I wasn’t exactly sure how to answer because, to be honest I wasn’t really sure what she was asking.
I could imagine it, sure…a small movie in my mind.
There was the butterfly, perhaps warming itself on a sunlit wall, or sitting on a twig, It’s wings slowly flapping, or on a stalk of milkweed, a vibrant vision in orange and black.
But again, the question, what did she mean, to preserve it?
I took a sip of my coffee...
Suddenly, I was transported back to my childhood, sitting in a school classroom, surrounded by the scent of formaldehyde and the interrupted whisper of stagnate insect wings.
We had made killing jars, preserving butterflies and other insects as a science projects. I was literally in a class called “Insects“ where our whole school year revolved around catching, preserving and cataloging examples of the various crawlies that inhabited the world around us, and this being in the forest of Northern California there were many…
Lace wings, grasshoppers, hundreds of different kinds of moths, beetles, and many, many, butterflies.
In fact I remember once we went on a field trip to a place called out on the coast called "Ano Nuevo", to see the great Monarch butterfly migration. They covered the dense eucalyptus trees in all directions, literally a foot thick. I remember walking down a leafy path marveling at the hundreds of thousands of Monarch butterflies covering the trees.
It was really an amazing sight, an entire forest of undulating orange and black.
I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point, I realized the path wasn’t leafy; we were literally walking on thousands of dead monarch butterflies…
There was a strict rule, we weren’t allowed to touch them… we could look at them, and apparently we can walk on them, but for some reason, we were still only allowed to catch and kill them if it was elsewhere.
Memories flooded my mind: Collecting specimins... the cold weight of the glass jar, the delicate touch required to handle the insects, the toxic scent, a mixture of bleach and ammonia…chloramine gas, also known as “Mustard Gas”, which was literally used in World War One to dispose of “the enemy”, but now to preserve an idea of beauty…
I remember mix of fascination and unease, sometimes even pity, as I gazed at the preserved creatures.
These were different times.
We stuck pins through insects, We stuffed animals with cotton, we dissected frogs and worms, fetal pigs…We collected skulls and bones and horns… Some still do…museums are filled with the lifeless husks of things we found beautiful.
There was certainly a time when it seemed to make sense to kill something in order to save it… But I feel, perhaps gratefully, that that time has passed.
So I wondered, How do we keep beauty forever?. Our ways of preserving memories have changed so much in my very lifetime. We’ve gone from glass jars and pins to digital media where we can document, and literally scan every detail, record every moment… back then when I was young, most of us couldn’t even afford cameras, so most of our documenting was done in scraps and bits, souvenirs and memorabilia, but over the years things changed and to be honest, I’m not even sure if people still stick bugs with pins anymore in order to somehow try and keep them, To document that moment of the world in a somehow tangible form.
But maybe not just document it, but to keep it there, at that time and place seemingly forever?
I literally thought about my life and all the moments that I have pinned to the walls of my memory or that I have stuck in a killing jar in order to try to keep them so that they somehow won’t go away… and I wondered, which is worse? To never have it? or lose its memory?
But the moment passed, and I returned to the present. And with those thoughts in mind, I asked a question:
“why do you want to preserve a monarch butterfly?”
“ Oh“ she said “I found it dead, in the windowsill, but it was so pretty. I thought I wanted to figure out how to save it”
My daughter waited for my response, but I was again lost in thought, the monarch butterfly forgotten, a fleeting thought, its fate uncertain, but mine fairly plain.
You can only preserve beauty as long as you can remember it, and after that, what else is there?
