Metamorphosis

It’s that time of year again. When they dust off the school buses, and the elementary building up the road begins to show signs of life once more.
It is time to go back to school.

I remember first-day jitters and my favorite lunch box. Kickball and the Pledge of Allegiance. And of course, hoping my desk would be close enough to the window ledge to be able to watch the caterpillars in glass boxes.
There were always caterpillars on the first day of school.


I found a small Black Swallowtail caterpillar on Queen Anne’s Lace in the field, recently hatched and still wearing his white saddle. Days later his plump green body nibbled hungrily beneath another umbel--the changes already beginning.


I snipped several stems of his favorite and carried them with me, home. A small glass vase keeps them fresh, as he eats and eats …and eats on our kitchen table.

Black Swallowtail caterpillar tethered to Ironweed

A day of stillness brings another change.


This time, his lovely chrysalis tethered by thin silken strands where his striped body hung the night before, as a newly furled leaf along the stem.


Shed caterpillar skin like a bunched up sock beneath him.
Faint lines upon green, trace the life changing within.


I see wings and eyes on a butterfly’s face.


Metamorphosis, a beautiful form evolving from behind the thinnest curtain, a child’s lesson never old.
A wonder of life to witness, each time, new.

Black Swallowtail chrysalis on Ironweed

Click photos to enlarge
Can you see his face and wings?

Shed skin showing head capsule