by Jane St. Clair

Once a year the butterflies come to Tucson Botanical Gardens . I love to watch them, although I have a friend who won’t. She believes that they are unhappy and beating their wings and fluttering like maniacs trying to escape through windows.

I don’t think so.

I think fluttering is what just what butterflies do.

Butterflies just flutter. They would flutter in or out of cages. They just flutter. They fly and flutter in straight lines, in circles and from this to that and they do it all day long.

They flutter all the time and you can’t figure out any rhyme nor reason why they do it.

Butterflies seem to have a lot of leisure,

which is shocking when you consider that they were once hardworking dedicated caterpillars who first had to eat all the time to get fat and ripe, and then had to build cocoons, which was also a lot of work. It was even more work to get out of the cocoons and get to be butterflies, who basically just flit through their days. George Carlin once said caterpillars do all the work but butterflies get all the publicity.

I am sure butterflies flutter and flit around in no particular pattern or meaning. In fact, Emily Dickinson once confessed that she could not trace a design in butterfly wanderings either, although she thought perhaps clover understood them.

In any event, butterflies look as if they are having a good time all day long for they are so very light, as if they take life lightly too. They get criticized for not being hard-working like bees and ants, for just laying around and goofing off — as if they’re getting away with something,

But after all, they are butterflies and that’s just what butterflies do.

I like them just the way they are.

It is so hard to take their pictures for butterflies don’t hold still, and this is frustrating because they are so beautiful and live such short lives, they deserve to have their pictures taken! The delicate patterns on their wings in all those colors and those swirly lines and circles! How exquisite is that? But they don’t take themselves or their beauty seriously enough to hold still for their picture.

I love the way they slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –They open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening, but to me, butterfly wings look more like the fans that beautiful geisha girls use. Open! Snap! Shut! Snap! Open! How cool is that?

They are so much like flying flowers that their name could be flowerfly, although I like their real name better. Their real name has a lilting music to it…. butterfly …. butterfly …. butterfly … butterfly… butterfly… butterfly …. butterfly …. butterfly … butterfly… butterfly… all day long… butterfly… and yet one more time butterfly …just the way you are… butterfly.