Shouldn't…but Do

Mr. Saturday Night is no longer —  I miss him already.

Mr. Saturday Night was an adventurous monarch caterpillar given to escapist feats. Placed in a jar for his own protection against winged predators, he had a penchant for wriggling out air holes and heading on down the highway, or at least the end of the shelf.

Big, striped, and saucy, that boy had a way about him.   Nobody could put down a milkweed leaf like he could.

And he is gone.

Yesterday, after hanging upside down for about a day, he sloughed his skin and disappeared into a jade-green chrysalis about one-third the size of his formerly formidable caterpillar form.

The root meaning of metaphor is to transfer, carry over or across.  Metamorphosis is to change, or transform.  Metamorphosis has always been a florid metaphor for human transformation.

We all know the story of the caterpillar and the chrysalis –  monarch butterflies are beloved for their beauty, their shape-shifting, and their migratory bent.  To me, they represent a life-long interest.  When young myself, I witnessed the same journey I now see again in Mr. Saturday Night and five of his closest friends.

Everyone sees what they will.  After years of troubling divorce and continuing instability, the permanence of the change in Mr. Saturday Night – his reduction to goo,  his sturdy reliance on unshakeable instinct to lead him forward – leave a deep impression on me.

Prior form is utterly gone – we have the shed skin to prove it.  Yet he survives, interior, contained, and changing.  His instinct, our faith,  he needs only to endure and follow his path to the sky.

At their age, my children are saddened by the disappearance of these beautiful caterpillars, they wonder at the change – and wait to see if nature holds good on the promise.  I do too.