Late summer pilgrimage

In a freshly paved alley behind Honesdale’s Main Street I discovered, on August 27, a one-inch caterpillar clinging to a milkweed plant that had invaded the new asphalt. I still don’t understand the forces that propelled the plant to breach the pavement, nor how, in that bare setting, its leaves beckoned to a monarch butterfly.

But a monarch egg had been laid and a caterpillar hatched, and because the plant was in the lee of a back porch, it had been spared by employees taking shortcuts to work, and by their cars. “Loaned” a paper cup by a nearby restaurant, I brought the leaf and caterpillar home, and fed the caterpillar until it made a chrysalis.

As noted on a small label fastened to the rearing box, “Egg laid on milkweed leaf behind Maple City Café, probably mid-August. Male monarch hatched in Butterfly Barn on 9/19.”

My friend Alexa, who lives in New Jersey, hatched a monarch on the same morning and called it “Special” because, as she explained in an e-mail: “I let go the butterfly and I named it Special because I think it was special that it hatched before I went to school.”

So mine became “Special # 2,” and on September 21, after sampling aster and artichoke flowers in the garden, it set a course for Mexico, wheeling ever higher on summer’s last day.