Oh it’s a long, long while from May to December—
But the days grow short when you reach September.
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time for the waiting game.
Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few . . .
— Kurt Weil, “September Song”
I had started this when I read an essay about summer memories written by the talented writer, Eric Cox, the publisher of the Knightstown Banner. We rarely talk, but his essay made my mind touch his. People’s memories differ, but they share the same nostalgic feelings.
This time of year, I always think about the annual pilgrimage that some of us made to Great-aunt Laura’s Michigantown home for Sunday dinner followed by a drive out to the Old Home Place pioneered by my ancestors.
The human brain is a miracle in that it allows us to select and synthesize experiences. Recently we were at Vicki’s and Tom’s home. Caterpillars were chomping huge holes in the leaves of the milkweed plant that she had planted. I took a great pleasure from seeing them because they are destined to be transformed into glorious Monarch butterflies. That triggered the memory of an experience about which I wrote several years ago when I saw butterflies bellying up to the “nectar bar” provided by our sedum plants.
Our lives are so filled with getting, spending, face-booking, tweeting and smart-phone obsessions that we take little notice of the quiet wonders of the seemingly simple creatures with which we share planet Earth. I‘d forgotten about the complex stages from egg to butterfly and how selective and inflexible nature is. I looked it up in an antique book published in 1911 that I bought at the Benton House Book Sale.
Take the aptly named Monarch butterfly: A caterpillar hatches from an egg deposited on a milkweed leaf. No other plant will do. If the Monarch caterpillar munches another kind of leaf, it will die. It voraciously eats and grows, shedding five skins. Next it attaches itself to a leaf by a silken thread and becomes a pupa around which a hard chrysalis is spun. It becomes transformed into a new being. It loses some of its legs and its mouth becomes the slender proboscis that the butterfly inserts in flowers to sip nectar. One day, the metamorphosis from what was a crawling, homely caterpillar into a butterfly is complete, and the lovely new being bursts forth.
And that’s just the beginning of the miracle of the Monarch! It was rather recently discovered that, incredibly, those fragile creatures form flocks and migrate thousands of miles to Mexico where they live on a certain kind of tree. Alas, the number of Monarchs in Mexico is declining because some local people chop down the trees and sell the timber.
Sometimes people tell me that they detect a note of melancholy in these essays. Although I find great happiness in my life, underneath the surface I am constantly saddened by what is happening:
For example, the rhinoceros is becoming extinct because the Chinese buy its horn as an aphrodisiac. Lions and other African animals are shot for the fun of it, and deer are “hunted” in fenced deer farms in Indiana. The redwood trees of California were decimated to build houses and fences. Strip coal mines have been developed near Bryce Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef. Oil is spilled into our oceans, and, recently, over three million gallons of acid mine sludge was accidentally — carelessly? — released into a tributary of the Colorado River.
We forget that we, too, are subject to natural law. It is of no import that butterflies are unaware of me. However, it is of huge import that I and the other human beings of this planet be aware of them and other wild creatures and protect them and this Earth which is, after all, our home. An ugly, manmade metamorphosis is in progress, and it is already September. wclarke@comcast.net