The Worm Turns
By Mary Sharry
Sun contributor
I started out as an egg. Perhaps I was more than that. I was an idea, but the egg is what was visible and ideas aren’t, not until they become manifest in some form or action. The egg was a gift from my mother, a Monarch butterfly, whom I, like the sea turtle, never knew. She made her deposit, which looked like a tiny pearl drop, on a milkweed leaf, the only plant that would sustain my existence until my transformation. On hatching from the egg, my miniscule body appeared the same as my adult self, a fat and juicy larva, a worm, until I pupated, split my skin and formed my cocoon-like chrysalis, pale-green encrusted in droplets of gold.
The process of my hatching from egg to forming a chrysalis took place in a vessel which was transformed from a pickle jar obtained at a restaurant called The Friendly Tavern, a feeding station for two-legged creatures. The evolution took about fifteen days and nights, and during that time I ate copiously and persistently, except when I napped. Fresh milkweed leaves, the only thing I would eat or could digest, were frequently supplied by a human, an odd specimen with weird and menacing eyeballs that rolled about and an enormous proboscis that pressed against the glass. The creature made strange sounds that caused me to stop munching, rest for a time, and wait for silence. As I ate, I’d chomp a hole through a leaf and peer through to the other side; and twice a day the leaf to which I clung was lifted from the jar which was cleansed of all my b.m’s—I was quite prolific in their production—and then fresh leaves were added.
Eventually, I had eaten all I needed of the milkweed and so I began to climb, weaving my way upward in a back and forth motion—after all, that’s what I was doing, weaving. When I reached the top of the jar and fastened myself to a lid fashioned from a piece of screen, I wove some more until I dropped downward and hung from my own cast webbing where I observed the world as I knew it then. I was attached like that for a day and a night, yet all the while exuding pulsing energy, then straining and swinging back and forth until my fragile skin broke apart and all my juicy insides began to set and harden like green jelly, my chrysalis was formed. The last to go was my thin skin and my head, a black shroud all balled up. Lacking vision, but if I could imagine, I’d picture my outer remains resembled just one more of my dark droppings at the bottom of the jar.
My new form hung, still and green and seemingly silent, yet inside that package a transformation was taking place. In 11 days my pale green form, the chrysalis, turned black with gold droplets that glistened. Inside the casing were the orange and black striping of the wings of a Monarch butterfly, that’s me, and by the next morning, after all that work, the chrysalis broke open and my beautiful transformation hung there, wet and dripping. The big-nosed creature, the one who walked on her hind legs, gently provided a slender twig for me to latch onto with my delicate legs, and I was carried outside to sunshine and gentle breeze where I grasped a leaf on a serviceberry tree. I clung there for several hours in awareness and wonder at the pulse and throb of nature. As my wings dried in the sunshine, I no longer had to crawl. I could fly. Adiós to milkweed below. Hola to nectar-filled blossoms. I was pollinating my way to Mexico, my purpose fulfilled, the idea of a Monarch butterfly.
