Butterflies, butterflies, I love butterflies.
As a boy I would zigzag pell-mell though Ohio backyards and fields in their pursuit with a sheer mesh net, green in color, on the end of a wooden pole. Like a trout fisherman, I always released what I caught rather than kill, dry, and pin them spread out for display.
Monarchs were my favorite “flying flowers” but the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, large and yellow with dark stripes, and the Common Buckeye with brown wings trimmed by orange and multicolored eyespots, were also among my fluttery flighted quarry.
Sometimes our childhoods never leaves us; I still love butterflies; I titled my debut novel “The Butterfly Tree” and one of my most cherished excursions was visiting The Key West Butterfly And Nature Conservatory with upwards of 1,500 individual butterflies, representing more than 60 different varieties, flying freely inside a colossal glass-domed climate-controlled humid habitat like rainbow-colored confetti after a pro sports championship game.
One butterfly landed, and stayed for a good while, on my shoulder; another perched in my open palm held outstretched; both instances made my heart go aflutter.
But my favorite butterfly ever, hands down, was as psychedelic as a kaleidoscope with blue and red and green and sunflower-yellow wings decorated with swirling lines and hearts and stars. Indeed, it looked like it was painted by Jackson Pollock or Picasso or maybe Van Gogh.
Instead, the wings were painted by a five-year-old girl, her tongue tip sometimes visible between her front teeth in deep concentration, while sitting beside her father at the kitchen table a few days before Halloween.
That was three decades and a little more ago, and the little girl was my daughter. She had decided she did not want to be a princess or Pink Power Ranger, costumes that would come in the years ahead, but instead wished to dress up as a butterfly.
From a moving box I cut out wings, wide wings three feet across, and fashioned a harness using shoestrings. With only small assistance, she painted the forewings and hindwings, front and back, a big project that took a few afternoons.
Together we also made antennae using two painted ping pong balls and pipe cleaners and a plastic headband; and for the rest of the costume she wore long thermal pink pajamas, sneakers, and a 100-watt smile filled with joy and pride.
On a cuteness scale of 1 to 10, she was no less than a 25!
My Little Butterfly wore many other costumes during her childhood, but when I close my eyes and think of Halloween this is the one I see. So you can understand why I have kept those magical wings all these many years.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.” Days ago, from the garage, I retrieved those cardboard butterfly wings made with a little girl’s full talent and blew the dust off their psychedelic patterns because my nearly 4-year-old granddaughter wanted to be a butterfly this year.
Auden already has her mother’s smile and demeanor, and tomorrow evening she will have her mommy’s butterfly wings while making trick-or-treating rounds. Time stutters and yesteryear is today and suddenly nostalgia has emerged after being inside a chrysalis since the early 1990s.
Seeing Auden try on her reborn costume made my heart undergo a sentimental metamorphosis: I now have a second little butterfly I love more than all others.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.