In flight

By ED WESELY

MILANVILLE, PA — When the phone rang in late October and a child’s voice bubbled about “pretty” flowers and “butterflies,” I discovered my caller was Mary Dale, aged four. She and her mom, Kim Wilson Owen, were calling from Montgomery, AL, from a public garden near their home.

“The butterfly hatched yesterday, and wow, that was terrific,” Kim said. “Right now we’re at the Shakespeare Garden that grows the plants Shakespeare wrote about.

“I was lucky, because the butterfly could have hatched in the plane on the way down here!

“This morning, we drove here with our cage and put the butterfly on a red rose that Mary Dale said was ‘pretty.’ We think it’s a girl; Mary Dale’s been calling her ‘Rose.’”

When visiting Milanville on October 21, Kim and her friend Alice had agreed to rescue two monarch butterflies and a chrysalis from my Butterfly Barn. It’s a chancy date for monarchs to begin their migration to central Mexico, and especially from this region, with frost in the offing.

But Kim’s call to Delta Airlines produced a bizarre twist: the airline insisted that live butterflies are “pet animals,” and declared that if Kim carried them aboard she’d pay a $75 seating fee.

Luckily, the young women were driving to Alice’s home near Lancaster that afternoon, where they could safely release the monarchs. And the next morning Kim decided to board her plane with the chrysalis—hoping to pass security in Harrisburg without having it x-rayed.

“I carried that little chrysalis onto the plane,” Kim recounted. “ I walked up to security and looked the clerk in the eye and told her, ‘it’s not a pet!’”

“She looked at me kind of funny, but a man said ‘go ahead and hand-inspect it.’ We teased back and forth, but everything went OK.

“When I came off the plane in Montgomery, Mary Dale’s face lit up and she said ‘it’s a chrysalis!’ She knew exactly what it was, because she’d seen a TV show where animal friends watch a caterpillar make a chrysalis.

“And the next day Rose hatched from the chrysalis.”

Upper Delaware monarchs have local friends, too, who collect and rear at-risk eggs and caterpillars, and others who transport autumn hatchlings to Maryland, Georgia and points south.

For a decade, Leonard and Avis Rolston have found room for my screened-in monarch box when they motor to Florida—11 butterflies this November, each with a tiny ID tag on a hind wing.

I reserve kind thoughts, too, for the Damascus School, where 40 or 50 late chrysalises hatch each autumn in Nancy Wood’s warm science room, creatures that would perish if left outdoors.

Reflecting on emotions stirred by this beautiful insect, I have paired them with Robert Frost’s lines about mowing a meadow, in which his narrator unexpectedly finds a “leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared.” Growing pensive, he muses about motives:

“The mower in the dew had loved them thus

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.”

“Morning gladness” is our own key, I believe: an essence we share with Mary Dale, and with each creature on our blue planet that plucks our heartstrings.