There are always surprises close to home. We have this ideation that the wondrous things are outside our reach, off faraway, somewhere else. But there is wonder right in front of us, if we open ourselves to it, and see it for what it is. As a writer, I confess my brain is always itching to fly off somewhere, and I suppose, through this restlessness as well as not being able to see the full value of what was in front of me, I've missed some of the simple stuff that makes life the precious thing it is. You realize at some point that it's all only about the seeing, the hearing, the touching, the believing, and being in this time, right here, right now. I have captured a few of those flighty moments, though, and I remember, and I'm grateful, and I hold them there in my misty memory book, and I pull them out occasionally, just for renewal, for that forever connection. This was surely a gift from the earth, the universe if ever there is one.
Let me tell you about the Butterfly House; that's what we've come to call it.
When my daughter was very young, she became my precious companion as we traipsed all over the land, the whole length of the wide creek bed, the abandoned campground that was nearby, up and down all over the winding country roads. She was a trooper, and always wanted to go with daddy; it was pure gold to have her along. We would stop to watch the tadpoles and the crayfish in the water, and she loved to take the shiny rocks that she pulled from the creek, and stack them to make these beautiful arrangements, the whole thing, the whole process was renewing, meditative, Zen like in the fullest cosmic measure that can be ascribed to it. That in itself is wonder enough. Ah, but no, more is yet to come. For this, I promise, you want to tag along.
Life is different, and moves at a different pace in this locale I'm talking about, and it was even different in an earlier time I'll reference. In another time before there were Walmart, and whatever other big name evil monstrosities you want to plug in here, people in Appalachia relied on the little country store that sat off on a side of the, often dirt, road at the mouth of a holler. The road where this house stood was now paved and led to a state park, but here it was a leftover, a marker of an earlier, slower, more grounded time. I guess no one had the will to tear it down. It indeed carried its own powerful memories. I know why it still stood where it stood.
This house was very close to the house we lived in. This former store building was ramshackle, grown over with weeds near to a thicket, with no door, windows just hollow black rectangles, no glass; the weather moved through of its own accord, winters, springs, summers, autumns, enough for two or three generations, the ghostly, lingering presence of another time, sad, gone. The roof was broken through leaving a jagged hole, a back wall was crumbling, threatening to fall at any moment. It was small yet stately in its own right, still standing, but wounded after all its lonely battles with the elements over the years.
My daughter always wanted go inside the house, and naturally I was reluctant based on its bad condition. I always discouraged her, but numerous times we bravely fought the weeds and crept up to the door, or where a door had been, and we would both peer inside this broken old house. What did we see? We saw only the detritus of time, dark shadows of once useful furnishings, a hole in the roof where the sun peeked through and, with the aid of, and at the whim of clouds, formed a slow roaming light strobe over blackened walls. That is as far as we would dare to go, and, except for the fact that a sapling had started to grow through the floor of the house and was finding its way toward the hole in the roof, that is all we saw.
One day in the lazy Summer haze, we were making our rounds again, and there it was, standing there, beckoning, and at my daughter's urging, we went in the direction of the house beside the road. As usual, I told her we could look inside the house, but we couldn't go inside because of the danger. She bounded ahead of me and got there first. With a little more urgency, I made my way to where she was, and stopped beside her. She stood there at the door-less entry, peering cautiously with her wide eyes full of wonder, transfixed by something inside. I paused, wondering what she could possibly be seeing, remembering how many times we had looked inside this old relic before, only to find shadows and dust. I asked her what she saw, and she pointed inside with her little finger. She stepped to the side so I could look, and with a big question mark hanging over my head, I peeked inside .Here is what she saw. Here is what I saw, and here is what filled her mind and my mind with joy and wonder.
The interior of this broken, abandoned shell had been transformed in the most wondrous way possible. All four walls, the ceiling, every nook and cranny, the wayward tree was alive with butterflies, thousands of butterflies. The rays of light stealing through the crumbling roof added just enough ambiance to place it in the realm of near dream. There they basked in the half light, their folding, unfolding of wings creating a rhythm behind a silent music that emanated from somewhere deep within the earth, a natural music only they could feel and hear. At that time, I had no words, didn't need any words to tell me what I was seeing. My daughter had words, though, the untainted kind born from innocence and the power of beauty. “Look, daddy, so many, where are they going?” “I guess they're trying to find somewhere safe because of winter.” The truth is, I couldn't say exactly why they chose this place at this time, or where they were going. I only know, and I think she knew, that we were witnessing something powerful, something that nature gives us as a gift, a reminder that we not lords of the earth, but sharers of spaces that are only as precious as we allow them to be.
All I really know is that on a day, years ago, in mid summer, in the heart of home, a wondrous kaleidoscope of viceroy butterflies transformed an old, broken relic of a grocery store from an earlier lost time, into a palace of throbbing, undulating orange gold.
As long as we lived there, my daughter invariably would want to visit the Butterfly House, and dutifully I would go with her, knowing that the odds of seeing the butterflies were slim. We would peer inside, but there were only the dark forms in disarray, only the musty odor of decaying wood, the dusty smell of time passing, and a tree slowly overtaking the space, the sad rays of wavering sunlight. “The butterflies are gone, daddy,” she'd say; I'd say, “yes, baby, the butterflies are gone.” “Will we ever see the butterflies again” she'd ask? “I don't know, we may not,” I'd say. “We'll remember the butterflies, though, they were beautiful, weren't they?” “Yes, daddy, they were beautiful. I'm going to remember the butterflies.”
I remember the butterflies, and the old building still stands transformed in that remote place in the mind, the way it was at the moment it became the Butterfly House, the moment we looked inside. At the moment we looked inside, we were transformed as well. It is important to be open to surprise, to be open to that moment of transformation. It doesn't have to be faraway, and it can be as close as the well-worn path at home.