2014 The Pinch Prize for Literary Nonfiction
In Michoacán, the migrating mariposas appear with November, as if trailing the marigolds trucked in for Day of the Dead. They come by the fragile millions, fluttering a few thousand miles from el norte to the transvolcanic range of their own origin. As such, the monarcas are seen to symbolize the annual returning of souls, they are the mascot of the local soccer club, and their patterned wings fan Mexico’s migration myth. In Mexico, they became my own myth and mascot as well.
Like these monarchs, I wasn’t hatched in Mexico, but in the Great Lakes region, where there is such abundance of milkweed lining roadsides and reclaiming fallows. As a child I scattered seeds from dried pods and smeared my hands with the sticky white sap that bubbled up like blood when I ripped a leaf or snapped a stem; the glands in my throat recall the bitter milk, my fingers the tack. I remember the monarchs also. I captured their fleshy pale green-and-black striped larvae, let them march up my ticklish arms on their stub legs. When I got older, I ran through weedy hayfields to net the winged adults. I practiced holding my captives just-so so the scales would not wipe off as I fed them sugar water, unfurling their proboscises with a sewing needle.
While in English butterfly has etymologists stumped, the ancient Greek word is psyche, the same as soul and breath. In Spanish, the word is mariposa, which is theoretically derived from the phrase “Maria, posa,” or “Mary, alight.” But in the days of my butterfly safaris through timothy and alfalfa it did not occur to me to reflect upon the “thread of vital light,” upon mortality, even as I imposed it with my sticky fingers and forced feeding.
Now that I’ve reached my adult life stage (however delayed it was coming), and am vaguely more aware of the damage I do to the world with my insatiable curiosity, more aware of the work of survival, it smarts to know how far those monarchs that I befell had traveled before they suffered at my hand. They were then just butterflies, mere ephemera bobbing from one bloom to the next, but they had, I realize now, a purpose beyond those flowers, a direction, a destination, even a grand design…