Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
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In honor of the “Books, Butterflies & Botanical Gardens” fundraiser benefiting the Ventura County Library Foundation on Sunday, October 19, this column from my archives seems apropos to share anew…
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In “A Moveable Feast,” a memoir of his halcyon days – and nights – in Paris in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway wrote of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust of a butterfly’s wings.”
A key reason for my traveling to Key West on vacation was to visit The Hemingway Home & Museum in Old Town. Five minutes away by foot, on the same block as the popular Southernmost Point in the Continental United States, is The Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory. Being so near, I decided to see some butterfly wings.
Entering the humid sanctuary with a soaring glass ceiling that seems to touch the clouds was to step into a time machine. Within seconds, I became a bubbly kindergartener on a school field trip.
“Look!” I reflexively exclaimed to my wife, pointing at a butterfly fluttering a few feet ahead.
“Look! … Look!” I quickly repeated, almost singing, as two more painted marvels danced through the air in slow motion.
Seeing a single butterfly in one’s backyard lightens the heart; here, inside the artificial outdoors, there are more than 3,000 representing 65 species. I had anticipated spotting butterflies would be like an aerial Easter egg hunt requiring eagle eyes and good luck. Instead, it was like being in the midst of an NBA championship celebration with confetti – oversized and alive! – floating all about.
My reaction to this psychedelic snowfall was as if watching Fourth of July fireworks: “Oooh! … Ahhh! … Wow! … Look at that one!” So unbridled was my childlike delight that I may have half-skipped along the winding pathway.
The climate-controlled paradise boasts beyond butterflies. The botanical garden features a rain forest of plants and trees, a meandering stream with resident turtles, and two gorgeous flamingos as florescent pink as a Key West sunset.
Long-long-long-legged Scarlet and Rhett were not always so radiant. After two years of bureaucratic pink tape to secure them, they arrived sickly and gray. Loving care, and importantly a diet rich in brine shrimp containing a natural dye called canthaxanthin, returned the “Gone with the Wind” pair to “flame-colored” per the Portuguese derivation “flamenco.”
Rhett and Scarlet, each 7 years old with life expectancies up to 75, enjoy the feathered company of 20 other species of exotic birds that seem to have had their feathers colored by imaginative children using the 64-count box of Crayola crayons.
Indeed, the fabulous fowls – “Look! … Oooh! … Another one over there!” – come in purples and pinks, reds and oranges, greens and golds, vibrant hues all. I wish you could see them.
Yet it is the butterflies that steal the show. One of the guides called them “flowers of the sky” which I think is perfect. I bet Hemingway would have loved that description too.
Two especially memorable moments occurred on my breathtaking stroll through this Land of Ahhs. First, a bird of a royal blue variety lighted on my left shoulder and remained perched for what seemed like a minute, although surely it was 10 seconds at most, before flying off.
Shortly thereafter, a “flower of the sky” as luminously turquoise as the local shallow ocean waters, lighted upon my right forearm. With its wings opening and closing ever so slowly for thermal regulation, it rested there for a true minute before bidding me farewell.
On a sheet of paper in a typewriter at Hemingway’s nearby home, a copy of a letter he wrote to a friend begins: “Having a wonderful time!!!”
That aptly describes my visit with the butterflies!!!
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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.