Like artists and travelers, only more so, small children cannot see anything as ‘normal.’ They spot the button on our jacket and ask themselves what is this dazzling object (easily as interesting as a light switch or my toes)?

The Good Enough Parent by The School of Life

It’s been a long time, too long, since I’ve felt awestruck. The day after I put a bouquet of butterfly weed cut from my garden on the dining table to liven up the house, I found sprinkles of caterpillar poop falling to the table around the vase, a telltale signs that something alive had taken up residence in the floral bouquet. They droppings were the same size and shape as those from monarch caterpillars I’d tried, and failed, to rescue earlier in the season. Given their demise, and the responsibility I felt for it, I wondered what I should do with the current interloper who was discharging waste onto my dining room table in an accumulating pellet pile, like tiny rabbit droppings. I looked among the flowers and spied a plump Monarch caterpillar with bold black, white and gold stripes as it mowed through clusters of Butterfly weed buds. This was not the Milkweed that grew along roads and ditches in New York and New England, which first caught my attention in 6th grade when we were learning about the life cycles of insects, but a more delicate variety with Day-Glo orange flowers that contrast boldly with the green backdrop of the garden foliage. I remember the first times I noticed the elaborate geometric clusters of Milkweed flowers that turned into teardrop pods in the fall, and then spilled forth and floated on the wind, and whose seeds we helped disperse by blowing them from our outstretched hands.

The caterpillar was busy chewing, plump and vibrant, its antennae gingerly sampling the branch and the flowers as it helped itself from the generous offering I’d clipped. I considered escorting it outside. As I watched its eager eating, I felt greedy myself to keep watching it. It might be a day or a week, but I was hungry to to witness this transformation. Each evening after work I brought in fresh cuttings of the flowers it depended on exclusively, flowers that were harder to find in the epoch of Roundup, and added them to the vase that was now its home. Day by day it grew on the steady diet I provided. At night I checked on it before going to bed and turned out the lights one by one behind me, leaving it alone in the darkness of the dining room, accompanied only by the house’s night sounds, the humming of a refrigerator and the circulating fan of the air conditioning. On the morning of my sixth day of watchful waiting, I discovered it hanging upside down by a straw colored thread of silk it had attached to one of the stiff branches. His lower body was still moving, but only a little bit. He looked like my son Calvin doing tiny sit ups, but while handing upside down. Its whole body was tense with the efforts of curling against gravity into a “J” shape. As I looked at it I imagined what it might feel approaching this precipice of change.

I felt a surge of excitement. I didn’t know what was next or how long it would take, but I knew change was coming. For this caterpillar it was butterfly or bust. How long would it take? What would it look like by the time I came home, by tomorrow, or next week? I took one last look at it; now, it was still, as if dead, but I knew better. Already late for work, I turned for the door. When next I stepped in the house, I rushed to the vase. The caterpillar was no more. In its place was a cocoon the absinthe, no–the color of the first aspen leaves in spring. A necklace of speckled gold and black dots ringed the back where it zipped itself in. I felt an electric jolt of joy travel up my spine as I examined the shape and color and the tiny folded edges of the cocoon. My mind lit up with joy. I was overcome with an irresistible urge to share the excitement coursing through me. My heart was beating. I felt alive with a sense of wonder. So ordinary; it happens every day. Yet there was nothing ordinary about it. The striped caterpillar was on a a journey towards a new life, packed up into a homemade suitcase, time traveling and shape shifting; its cells were legos that had been disassembled and were being resorted and redeployed, destined for a new form. When next it opened its eyes, it would have exotic new powers, of flight and reproduction. I turned around. I jumped up. My heart thump thumping in my chest. I could not contain myself. I had to share this bedazzling spectacle.