Riffing on a theme

Swallowtail. These are the local butterfly everyone recognizes; we see them everywhere (picture below is from Shevlin Park) and they are bo-dacious.

Again: I had no idea so many different subspecies of butterfly existed. At first I thought this was the Oregon swallowtail; but it must be the two-tailed swallowtail. Unless it's the anise swallowtail...

... where my daughter and I found blue butterflies. She caught a few but let them all go.

I had no idea so many types of butterflies existed. I looked online for a long time before concluding this must be a Boiduval's blue. Pretty, isn't it?

Green + yellow + blue

My son and his best friend fill our house (and yard) with a truly incredible degree of sound and energy, so this afternoon we took them out to the desert where they could be as wild as they liked.

Near Pine Mountain.

Whisperer

Note on the back door

Why aspen leaves litter my house

My daughter received one of those painted lady butterfly kits for her birthday. It came with a little butterfly tent and a coupon which could be redeemed for caterpillars. My sister, that smart woman, mailed the coupon about the same time she ordered the kit, so Sasha waited only a few days for the caterpillars to arrive; but even still, she could barely stand it. She set up the little tent and put ladybugs inside to pass the time.

When the caterpillars finally arrived, she chased the ladybugs out and set the jar of caterpillars in the cage instead. The caterpillars were surprisingly interesting to watch, like fish. They climbed around their jar and wriggled and ate the mush provided to them. Then – after quite a short time, maybe seven days – we watched them cocoon. I'd expected them to spin white silk around themselves, like tent caterpillars, but in fact they hung upside down and just sort of ... solidified.

The cocoons are black with a bit of gold. They hang inside the jar, motionless. They look exactly like what my daughter tells me they are supposed to look like: a dead leaf.

Caterpillars are interesting to watch, like fish, as I said; but cocoons, once they form, are boring. Watching a cocoon is like watching a rock. Or, I suppose, a dead leaf.

And so my daughter has been busying herself preparing for the butterflies: making sugar water, adding oranges to the grocery list -- and converting our camping tent to butterfly habitat. (When they emerge she wants to release them inside the tent and sit among them.) At first we set up the tent in the back yard, but it turned out we'd set it on a sprinkler head, so we carried it through the house to the front porch instead. She decorated the interior with artificial flowers, real lilacs, firewood logs and the eponymous aspen branches. It's gorgeous. The butterflies will love it!

And they chatted away at the ladybug picnic

My daughter has been bringing me ladybugs. On her walk home from the school bus she passes a patch of lupine which is infested with aphids; it is, apparently, ladybug heaven. She watches the ladybugs awhile, she says, then catches one or two or five and then runs home, bursts through the door and deposits them on my laptop. They walk around. They crawl up my screen and then fall down. It's hard to type with a ladybug on the keys; so I log out.

Wednesday I watched a ladybug do this odd little dance on the letter C, up and down up and down, the way lizards will do, and suddenly I wondered if she were trying to lay eggs and I thought, a keyboard is not a safe place for eggs, so I brushed her away. Then yesterday, lo, Sasha did find ladybug eggs on the windowpane.

How do you know they're ladybug eggs, Sasha?

I just know, Mom.

Today she and I walked past the lupine and she showed me the many, many mating ladybugs, and on a leaf we found a pile of what looked like very small orange roe – exactly the same sort of small orange roe Sasha found on the windowpane. So she must be right. They must be ladybug eggs. O ye of little faith!

*

Because I know this is in your head now: Sesame Street's Ladybug Picnic sketch.

For Corey

“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying, life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

 —The Creation of Éa”

Ursula K. LeGuin

This is the only prayer I know. Fare well, cousin.

Gluten-low kitchen sink muffins (for Jill)

Based on a recipe at cooks.com, modified to use up what I had in my kitchen at the moment. Big shout out to Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" for teaching me to bake this way! I'll make it through the apocalypse now.

1 c. oats
1/4 c. barley flour
3/4 c. oat flour
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 c. plain yogurt
1/4 c. vanilla yogurt
1/2 c. coconut oil
1/2 c. raisins
2 tbsp daughter's leftover Grapenuts cereal, soaked in milk for 10 hours

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix dry ingredients.

Mix wet ingredients.

Add wet to dry, stir only until combined. Pour into greased muffin tins.

Bake 15 minutes. Enjoy warm with butter.

Note to self: More raisins would be better.