Butterfly

Sometimes when I was a little girl, I would wonder if caterpillars got lost. I would see them in the gardens in the spring, and then they would disappear. I asked my mother about it and she smiled, saying that they never got lost, they were only hiding. She took me back out to the garden that evening, and up in a tree she pointed out the chrysalis' under one of the willow's branches. I wondered what would happen to them after this.

She brought me back out to the gardens a few weeks later, and I saw my first butterfly's. They were monarch's. The yellow of their wings matched the roses. But there had been one small cocoon that had not erupted with life. My mother said it was a late bloomer, and that it too would become a beautiful butterfly with time.

Although with the spring, came the storms. Only a day after I saw the butterfly's, the worst storm I can remember came through. My mother held me all through the night, because I couldn't sleep. I wasn't scared, but something was very wrong, and I could feel it deep in my bones.

The next morning I went into the garden, while my mother was still asleep. The storm had come and gone with little to no damage to the garden's, other than the occasional branch snagging on the rose bushes. Everything was fine until I came to the old willow where the chrysalis' had been. Lightening had struck the willow, splitting it in two. The branch that had held the chrysalis had smashed into the ground, and was buried deep in the earth.

All I could think about was that one small cocoon that now would never know life again.