Carrie's headline

Iremembered this yesterday as I sat out on the deck with my parents and two of their oldest friends at their cabin “up north.” We noticed as a tiny, furry ball began descending from the trees far overhead. Lower and lower it dropped until it was just over our heads.

“What is that?” my mother asked. We didn’t know.

At this point, the furry ball seemed to know it had an audience and began to swing, just a little at first, but soon in wider and wider arcs as the wind picked up. It lowered and then raised itself on its invisible line as it swooped forward and back and around. It was an impressive aerial show, and all the more so when I learned it was a tiny, furry caterpillar.

The caterpillar was engaged in something called “ballooning,” a verb I had only heard used to mean when something got bigger. In this case, it meant swinging in the wind at the end of a long silk line from the tree branches high overhead. The goal of ballooning, I learned, was to find a new and suitable place to live. It was the most exciting form of house hunting I’d ever seen.

Five adults, four of them over 90, sat transfixed by this little caterpillar zooming overhead in circles.

“If anyone asks what I did today, I’ll tell them I watched a worm,” my mother’s friend, Char, observed.

“There are worse ways to spend a day,” I noted.

The tiny moth caterpillar, flying around like a miraculous aerial artist, finally landed in Char’s hair. Char did not think she would be a suitable home for this tiny, adventurous creature, and the caterpillar disappeared under the deck. We will never know what it did after that.

I’d just been thinking a lot about caterpillars, as the monarch caterpillars are hard at work eating milkweed and making chrysalises. I remember as a second grader having a monarch caterpillar in a jar in our classroom. We started with an egg, already attached to milkweed. The caterpillar emerged from the egg and got busy eating immediately. It grew with astonishing speed and eventually hung off the milkweed in the shape of a J.

Then the fascinated second graders watched it spin its chrysalis, a bright green pea pod with a golden seam. The chrysalis would gradually change color, becoming more and more transparent until, one day, the butterfly emerged from the chrysalis, fully formed. We watched it slowly stretch and spread its beautiful orange wings, and then the second graders would troop out onto the playground to release this magnificent creature.

It was astonishing. But it was not as astonishing as what happened next. After that, the caterpillar, who had spent her early autumn turning herself into a butterfly in our second-grade classroom, would fly all the way to Mexico.

All of this leads me to believe that my life will never be as interesting as a caterpillar’s.

We compare ourselves to butterflies when we talk about making big changes or becoming a better version of ourselves. I think it is a good metaphor, and I find butterflies inspiring – particularly when they head off to Mexico, fresh out of a jar, without a GPS or map.

But it’s good to remember that before there was a butterfly, there was a daring and diligent little caterpillar. They are not as beautiful as butterflies, perhaps, but they get the work done – whether it’s spinning a chrysalis or ballooning from a 60-foot thread, dancing in the wind.

Till next time,

Carrie