Butterflies

I’ve noticed a lot of butterflies since moving here. A weird amount, given in Ann Arbor, I lived near a lot more trees and nature areas, but I noticed very few butterflies. I can’t recall any specific time I noticed a butterfly.

Yet in Chicago, I have noticed butterflies perhaps a dozen times. They’re magnificent – fluttering along the lakeshore, bright red, flapping. Butterflies pierced through the noisy walls of city life. Theoretically migrating for the winter, but doing it in lazy, entrancing loops, lost in themselves.

I notice them through all the noise. I sat on my office rooftop trying to unreel the urban tape from my skull. A butterfly flapped by. I’d never noticed that. Each flap cut through the HVAC drone. It was black and yellow, a combination I never took note of before. Maybe it was an eastern tiger swallowtail, or a black swallowtail, I don’t know. I could see its wings.

It’s not limited to butterflies. My rooftop smells pungent, fermented, with notes of vanilla and sage. I suffered through it until it intoxicated me, like an aromatic hug. I smelled it again in one of the priairies planted on the lakefront. I love it. I saw a bug in Humbolt Park that I could have sworn was a twig, or a leaf. I tried to pick it up but it jumped away.

It is very hard to find quiet in Chicago. You can never escape from the drone of cars and trucks, the beeps of buses, the rumbles and honks of trains. The squeals, honks, roars, thumps. The small things help keep you sane. The squirrels, bugs, trees, grasses, water, even the rats if you are ambitious¹. The sun and the moon come out every day, and if you are dedicated, you can watch them do that over the lake.

It is only month three, and I live on a street that generates a creative quantity of noises. But I’d like to appreciate the parts of Chicago that humans didn’t put here. You can draw a broad brush on the butterfly, saying it migrates north and south with no complaints. But to get to its final destination, the butterfly flaps, darts, flits, and rolls, appearing directionless. We get to admire it, and we don’t complain that it takes a journey. I’ll give myself the same grace.