Butterfly Visit

In Honor of the Monarchs

It Has a Story: Butterfly Visit

By Carol Van Klompenburg

Two metal-and-glass butterflies brighten our bathroom. Both of them gifts, one for Mothers’ Day and the other for my birthday.

In our previous home, with its extensive gardens, they hung outdoors, the larger one on a white latticework under the deck and the smaller one on a tree in the entry garden. They came indoors in winter for protection from ice and snow. One is made from molded metal sheets painted red, gold, and blue. The other is shaped from copper wire with molded plastic and marbles in shades of green.

Additional butterflies are scattered through other rooms of our home.

Why butterflies? It is not just because they are beautiful, although they are. My love of butterflies harks back to the day of a visitation by a monarch.

Sitting on my front yard patio decades ago, I tried to focus on the day’s lectionary readings. The pages of my zippered Bible lay blurred and bright on the mosaic table. I squinted to block the midmorning rays.

Grasshoppers leapt from the azaleas. Crickets chirped. Under the August sun, moisture beaded up on the cracks and wrinkles in my arms. I sighed and gazed wearily at the sagging barn across the road. A monarch flitted from a milkweed pod, then hovered near me.

It had been a dry month in my gardens and in my heart. As the monarch hovered, my longing rose. I sat immobile, willing her toward me, in silence begging her to land her curved triangles of orange framed in black on my freckled hands, my blue veins large under translucent skin.

She flitted, teased, and then I held my breath as she landed on my wrist. She opened her wings, a black lace fringe at the rear of each. She folded them as if in prayer and showed me their lighter underside. She unfurled her black thread tongue into a wet wrinkle in my wrist and sipped daintily. She hovered and settled down for a second sip, her wings translucent in the morning light.

My skin tingled under her feet and tongue. In June, her coiled tongue had been the chewing mouth of a caterpillar. In September, she would have laid her eggs and died. But today, wings opening and closing in the morning sun, she sipped a third time from the rivulet in my wrist and then flitted into the blue beyond.

Some say that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings can, in time, trigger clouds or sunshine a continent away. I don’t know about weather changes in the other hemisphere. I do know that when a monarch landed on me, drank deeply, and then lifted her stained-glass wings, my heart soared with her.

And that memory keeps me adding butterflies to my home. Butterflies have become sacred symbols, reminders of the morning a monarch visited, sent by the King.