This morning as I drank my customary cup of coffee on the porch, I surveyed the rain-soaked yard and saw a strange movement under one of the trees at the end of the driveway.
It looked like a pair of huge yellow leaves, flapping without wind. My first instinct was, Moth. But I'd never seen a moth that size before, so I thought, wounded bird? And made my way barefoot across the yard to investigate.
It was a moth, the biggest I'd ever seen, with a good six-inch wingspan. A delicate yellow with patterns of lavender running across two pairs of ragged and damaged wings, it flipped and rolled under the attack of a yellow jacket.
I hate yellow jackets, and while I know that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" and that a true naturalist would have quietly observed this unusual display of savagery, I picked up a stick and entered the war on the moth's behalf. I can't stand seeing a helpless thing suffer. I probably looked insane, jabbing at the ground and leaping backward, but I addled the bee enough that it landed to try to get its bearings, and I cut it in half with the stick, drove its body into the dirt, and bent, crooning, over the moth.
It looked like a goner -- last night's thunderstorm must have taken a merciless toll. It was too wet to fly, and in places all color and wing dust had been wiped clean to reveal the shimmer of translucent veins. I coached the moth onto a stick and lifted it free of the ants swarming the dirt.
Something about it nudged a memory I never had -- like so many of my memories, it came from a book. I thought, suddenly, I'll bet this is a Yellow Emperor. As a child, and now an adult, I cherish the book Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter, a nineteenth century northern Indiana naturalist who also penned beautiful fiction. This particular book features the Yellow Emperor moth as a key plot point, and a thrill ran through me as I looked on my dingy, but rare, find.
There's something miraculous about seeing a beloved piece of fiction spring to life. I carefully transported the moth to one of my porch chairs, to keep it as safe as possible from foraging ants and other reasonlessly violent hornets. I doubt it will make it, but, bedraggled as it was, it was still beautiful.
4 comments:
I enjoyed Girl of the Limberlost immensely as a child, though I only vaguely remember the story now.
Freckles, however, I read and re-read to tatters. Though, if memory serves, Freckles makes a sort of cameo in Girl of the Limberlost, I always thought Stratton-Porter blew it for both of them by not allowing Elnora and him to really find each other. Not all clichés are bad clichés.
Oh, well. At least he had an awesome swamp to play in...
And it's all gone now. I've driven on the highway through where the Limberlost once stood. It's all drained corn and soybean fields now.
Really makes a person hate industrialism.
Freckles makes a delightful cameo toward the end of Girl of the Limberlost, with the Angel, sheltering Elnora in their summer lake home. You don't get to see much of the boy he was, but the intertwining of the tales is pretty cool.
I love Freckles, too...such a luminous spirit. And what a swamp! Makes me long for places of deep wildness and undiscovered mystery.
You knew that Stratton-Porter is the Bird Woman, right? And I'd always wondered why the Bird Woman was so kind and wise...
I did not know that... Perhaps a re-read of Freckles and Girl is warranted before the new semester begins.
It's time for another book raid on my folks' house, it seems.
I've padded my library substantially with books on permanent loan from my parents. They say "stolen," but whatever.
Freckles and Girl, though, I had to buy myself; my mother would have killed me had those gone missing.
Now I want to reread them myself.
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