Year of the Snake

Nostalgia

53 Nostalgia Yellow monarchs came to sample the sweet William from my mother’s garden and my father taught me to charm them— how to creep up on one, keeping the startling edges of my shadow concealed, the offer of my index finger, branch-like. I’d hold my breath and wait, dizzy in that heart-stopping moment when a butterfly would test the strange terrain of my skin in the delicate pincer grip of its feet. Sometimes I would pluck off a sprig of sweet William so that I could see it unfurl the black wiry length of its sinewy tongue, which was wrapped with the tight precision of a roll of licorice, and slip it down, clever as a coat hanger, to unlock the heart of the flower’s sweetness. But it was always the monarch caterpillars 54 I loved best—their juicy ripe-fruit plumpness, shocking school-bus yellow and elaborate tattoo of their talcum-powder skin; the slinky give and take on lovely, suction-cup feet. I kept them as pets, fed them Swiss chard and lettuce. It was the before of them I loved—before the obsessed thread spinning, the chill and shroud of the cocoon, before the need to completely recreate themselves into a winged scaled thing with an unappeasable hunger and unknown miles to go. ...