The Butterfly Effect

Our granddaughter M woke up Thursday from her nap with the remnants of a butterfly tattoo on the back of her left hand. Parts of it were missing because she had slept hard, perhaps resting her cheek on that hand, but the wings were still clearly delineated and beautiful. And she was wearing her black t-shirt with pink contrasting ruffles at the ends of the sleeves and a pink embroidered butterfly on the front above the word CANADA done in little plastic jewels. It was a gift we had got her after our tour through the Butterfly Conservatory.

After M got up, Lorraine cut out another tattoo from the little book we had bought at the gift shop and put it on the back of her right hand. Then she put them on our son JE and daughter-in-law S, so that the whole family could be wearing butterfly tattoos. When I read one of M’s books with her, I learned that the name butterfly came from the bright yellow colour of some species, which was like butter, a fact I had never known or even thought about, though now the etymological dictionary is telling me that they also might have been so named because of their habit of flying around butter churns and cream. To me butterflies were butterflies, their own wondrous flying selves, and, unlike buttercups, I never really noticed the presence of “butter” in their name.
The Butterfly Conservatory was a great spot to be on Thursday, which was a cold February morning there on the edge of the Niagara Gorge, with snowy parking lots and crunchy walkways. Inside was a little tropical oasis filled with a variety of palm trees, cascades of water, lilies and false vervain in bloom, and feeding stations with sliced oranges and huge butterflies happily feeding. M loved being able to walk along the pathways checking out flowers and watching the butterflies fly around and land. She was especially impressed when a blue morpho landed on the front of her Nan’s sweater and just perched there for a few moments.

I loved being inside that tropical environment on a wintry day, seeing all the plants, listening to the flow of the water, finding more and more amazing butterflies we hadn’t seen before, checking out the chrysalids hanging in the incubation chamber and the emerging adults, and just hanging out with M and Lorraine and JE.
But what amazed me most were the blue morphos. They flew through the conservatory with a slow flapping and gliding of their large wings that flashed patches of unearthly blue. They were like bright ethereal birds. You could never catch their flight with your camera because they were always moving and changing direction, and when they perched the blue was hidden inside the beautiful mottled brown underside of their wings, so you had to hold the beauty of those flashes of blue in your brain’s memory and not the camera’s.
What else is there to say? These gorgeous creatures that emerged from chrysalids like delicately folded dry leaves flew in front of our eyes, feasted on slices of orange, perched on Lorraine’s sweater, and brightened our day.

No wonder the ancient Greeks called the butterfly Psyche; its ethereal presence and graceful flight does suggest something we might call breath or soul.