Butterflies

Two Saturdays in a row I've had the joy of visiting the butterflies in their home. Different guests were visiting us, see, and everyone wanted to meet the brightly-winged creatures.

The Butterfly Place is a terrarium of sorts, an indoor museum of living specimens. After paying admission, one pulls back a heavy brown metal door (provided the red light isn't on) and enters a large room of bright flowers and fairy-like animals. At first, the constant busy butterfly motion is almost dizzying--flap flap flutter, flap flap flutter--but after a while one acclimates to the motion and the warmth and the color, and finds stillness in the activity. Classical piano music plays. It's very soothing and always makes me sleepy.

There must be hundreds of butterflies in that space. Little fluttery ones, black with hot pink and yellow markings; big, majestic sky blue ones, who fold their wings to a dull camouflage brown; large papery white ones with lacy black markings; classic, dainty orange-and-black monarchs; fuzzy little brown ones that tirelessly play in threes. And on and on. A path snakes through the flowers. Several benches are spaced out along it, places to sit and--if you're lucky--let a butterfly sit on you. The queenly white ones landed on me during both visits, attracted by my blue green bag. Yesterday my butterfly friend flew up and down all over my bare legs, at which I drew the line. It tickled.

Adding to this buffet of color is a little koi pond, with maybe 7 giant orange-gold-white-red fish swimming about, staring back at human onlookers. A few fuzzy quail sometimes peep out from the flowers.

Then there are children, many many children brought by their parents. This weekend, one little girl cried and cried, perhaps overtired. Another, traveling in the same party, smiled beatifically, adoring the butterflies; she only cried when it was time to go home. A small Asian girl, resplendent as a butterfly in hot pink, really really wanted to touch the delicate insects. Her dad explained that this was the butterflies' home, so she couldn't touch them. "But if they came to my home I'd let them touch me!"

We learned some stuff, too. Butterflies can only fly when their temperature is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why they spend so much time with wings outspread to the sun, warming up. There are 17,500 known species of butterflies, but only 9,000 known species of birds and something like 2,000 known species of mammals. Butterflies live pretty much everywhere in the world, with 700 species in North America.

But, most of all, they're beautiful to the point of magic.