© Loree Griffin Burns
That right there is the pupal stage of a Monarch butterfly. The jade green chrysalis with golden accents is hard to spot in the wild, so blended is it with the surrounding plants and bushes. I told my daughter this during a walk last week. We were in a milkweed meadow in the late afternoon and conditions weren’t good for our butterfly tagging mission. I suggested she look for ladybugs or caterpillars instead, but she wanted to look for a chrysalis.
“They’re pretty hard to find,” I warned her. “I know adults who have searched for years and never found one.”
She was walking behind me at the time, and she gave her patented Whatever laugh.
“It’s really not that hard, Mom,” she said.
I turned to disagree, to tell her about the man I know who has been watching and raising Monarch butterflies for more than twenty years and never, not once, seen a chrysalis in the wild. And there was my daughter, nose to pupa with a chrysalis, right there in our immediate wild. She was studying the golden threads, the droplets of dew, the silken pad holding the whole thing up.
And there you go. This is the thing about kids and nature that has so captured my imagination lately. This is the very beating heart of my citizen science book, in fact: young people see the world differently than us older people do.
Why?
Well, for starters, there’s physical stature. My daughter is four feet tall and was looking up at the chrysalis; I am five feet seven inches, and it was so far under my nose I didn’t even notice it. The physical geography of place is different for her; she was quite literally closer to the meadow around us.
There’s also the sensitivity issue. At almost forty years old and I don’t perceive sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes as well as I once did. My daughter’s senses, on the other hand, are still developing. Each day she sees and hears and smells and feels and tastes a little better than the day before. She is coming into her prime just as I pass mine.
And then there is the matter of focus. As I breezed past that chrysalis, my eyes were on the place around me but my head was only partially there. I was thinking about chrysalids, but also about my daughter, how nice it was to spend time with her; and what I would make for dinner and how badly I needed to remember to stop and buy a gallon of milk on the way home; how soon we should leave the meadow in order to pick up my boys from soccer practice; how well (or not) I had rendered this magical place—the milkweed meadow—in my writing earlier that day; and so on and so on forever and a day. I live in several moments at once. My daughter lives in the one and only moment at hand. And so she finds the magic.
This little meadow incident, coupled with the timely and wise words of my friend Linda, has helped me re-focus myself and my book in progress this week. The spine is clear. I need only grip it tightly and keep writing.