When I first started making phone calls to science supply stores and pet shops looking for butterflies to hatch for Easter, it was almost a month away. Some people were polite on the phone. Others had but a thin veneer over their private opinion of me. 

 

"No, I'm afraid we don't carry butterflies but we have a large selection of guppies."

 

Then someone suggested nurseries. They had apparently heard of people buying insects to ward of noxious pests. What a monarch is capable of instilling fear in I'm not sure but I checked the yellow pages. When I eventually spoke to a kind voice at a local wild life sanctuary, she actually registered comprehension. 

 

"Someone asked me that about six months ago. Let me get you the information."

 

She offered to mail it to me but I was too jubilant to wait. With four semi shod children in tow, I fairly flew out to the nature center. Partly in my appreciation for her help and partly to repay her for validating my sanity, I picked out a butterfly book, a T-shirt of poppies (which I never would have bought under normal circumstances) and generously told the kids to each pick out three packages of seeds. 

 

"That will be $40," she told me. Suddenly sobered, I mentally added it up in my head. Yup it was $40 and I can't back out on the shirt cuz she's already wearing it.

 

Unruffled we headed home to begin our unit on entomology. I scoured the reference pages and began calling insect supply houses. With the use of a magical number and an expiration date, there were a dozen caterpillars on their way to my house and twice as many dollars on their way to my Visa statement. Happy was the day they arrived, and we gave those wigglers enough aerobic attention to make a flock of woodpeckers look like a slumber party.

 

They lived by the breakfast table for a couple of weeks, as we talked about, read about and spilled on the caterpillars, waiting for them to spin their cocoons. 

 

It was only seven days before Easter when my husband pointed out that our caterpillars were still caterpillars. We had hoped to use the butterflies in the church service and things looked doubtful. So I called more people on various corners of the continent and found a place that would send me pre-crysalised creatures, express air. I blocked out nagging thoughts about the thousands of worms, caterpillars, cocoons and winged nymphs escaping my untrained eye within a half mile radius as I mechanically repeated the Visa digits. Forty eight hours and as many dollars later the UPS man brought a small box of sleeping swallowtails and we settled them above a humidifier hoping they wouldn't cook. Then I got a call back from one of the uncounted bug people saying she would deliver live butterflies to my door. I looked skeptically at these little gray sepulchers and asked her price. Once again I said yes and molded the events of my Easter Eve around waiting for the Butterfly Lady. 

 

She arrived and we traded an oatmeal box full of wings for a small insignificant slip of green paper. I ignored peripheral thoughts of the many moths I have squished and we all gathered around to savor our Painted Ladies. 

 

The service was wonderful! John made a little scene of rocks, greens and flowers and although I can't say the butterflies exactly burst out of the tomb when he moved the rock they did sort of trickle. The congregation was riveted to these fluttering things and when he invited the children up to each get a caterpillar or cocoon, I heard him say at least twice to "stop pushing". 

 

Several days later when our cocoon quietly hatched, the unit on entomology slid into a workshop on the humane treatment of animals. This particular butterfly would have had better odds in an aviary.

 

"Why did the wing come off?" my three year old asked. "I think the banana I fed him stuck his wings together," said my 5 year old. The older two threatened to have what would surely have been a fatal tug of war over the remaining lepidoptera, and I brought our science lesson to a close by letting him go in the garden.