monarch butterfly, michigan avenue

Last night, I found a brown creeper on the sidewalk. Stranded on its back, barely moving twig-lean legs, eyes huge and flat black. I lifted it up and brought it home, waiting for the treatment center to open. Dark and quiet place, but this morning the creeper hadn’t made it. I’m still seeing its frail feet twitch, feeling the little shudders run through it, thinking it would live, be strong.

So our butterfly is the mascot for this morning, when I need something hopeful, lovely, easy, something less melancholy than a bird I couldn’t save.

differential grasshopper, division street

If you’ve ever seen the 1957 classic Beginning of the End, at this point you’ll be prickling with a vague unease. You’ll feel, perhaps, that an inquisitive mind and Chicago grasshoppers make for a dangerous combination. Let me assure you that, if I am unwittingly setting in motion events which will ultimately threaten human civilization… well then, I’m sorry. Truly. But look at that eye—that spectacular, quicksilver, radiant lunar thing of an eye, that “enormous and complicated” eye, in the words of Mary Oliver—and tell me you aren’t fascinated. Tell me you wouldn’t have to learn more, military conspiracies be damned.

But about the widespread devouring of human flesh and the peril to human civilization… well, that’s a shame. I never meant it to end that way.