In fourth grade my teacher was Mrs. Sonnon. She taught us about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. Unlike most of what we learned in school, I found that to be extremely interesting.
It was so interesting that as summer came and school let out and was far, far from my mind, her words were not. I still remembered with great excitement what she taught us when I realized I was walking through a large patch of milkweed growing in a field near our house. Milkweed, we had learned, was the exclusive food source of monarch caterpillars.
And sure enough, there on the milkweed flowers were monarch butterflies feeding on nectar. But other butterflies were doing something else as well. Some monarchs were concentrating more on the leaves than the flowers, bending their slender abdomens so the tip just touched the underside of the leaves.
It occurred to me they were laying eggs, and so I looked at the spots the butterflies had just visited. Sure enough, where the abdomen had touched the leaf there would be a single egg, about the size of the head of a pin. They were white, shaped almost like a football, and deeply grooved. I took some home and watched them hatch. Keeping the caterpillars supplied with fresh milkweed, they ate furiously and grew rapidly. I watched in awe as they made their first chrysalises—some on the ceiling of my bedroom-- and then with a sense of pride as they hatched into butterflies and eventually flew away.
With the hunger to learn still more kindled, I went to the library and checked out every book I could find about butterflies and moths. I studied them religiously every chance I got. I branched out from monarchs to other butterflies like black swallowtails and spicebush swallowtails and even the “cabbage worms” we found in people’s gardens. From butterflies I went to moths, such as tomato hornworms or the drop dead gorgeous giant silk moth’s with some of the world’s ugliest caterpillars—Prometheus and Cecropias being our favorites (I still look for these caterpillars every summer, but I haven’t found one in years) .
Sometimes, I think, we all wonder what-- if any-- impact we have on the people around us, whether anyone is really listening, whether we are making any difference at all. I have to imagine Mrs. Sonnon felt this, teaching unruly fourth graders. I have to imagine she at least sometimes wondered if we even heard a single word she was saying.
I heard, Mrs. Sonnon. I heard.
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