FEBRUARY

WINTER BUTTERFLIES

By now every bird in surrounding forest knows they will be fed here. The flutter outside my window starts in a murky gray of early winter morning and goes on busily into the brilliance of noon and then almost complete darkness that now, thankfully, comes almost an hour later than it did in December. I try to provide water too but it freezes almost instantaneously. Luckily river is just a straight shot across the road, and it’s not frozen yet, from my kitchen window i can see sun sparkling on the water surface. I can only see river from the house in a winter when the forest stands naked.

Come spring birds will return the favor. They will be patrolling my gardens for overpopulation of insects, and what they can’t get from up high chickens will get from down below. Creatures bring life into the garden, animating what would be otherwise still life painting. Of course, wind does it too but it doesn’t have a sudden scream of red where cardinals are fighting in the boxwoods - cardinals are bullies, really - or a streak of azure when i catch a bluebird with just a corner of my eye. The powerful song of the wind sings of trouble and destruction, while the morning proclamations of blackbirds promises warmth, sunshine, and maybe gentle rain in the afternoon. Creatures are real inhabitants of this garden, they were here before me and they still will be here after I’m gone, I find comfort in it and I bribe them into remembering me, even just for a short span of bird’s life.

My mind whips around few decades taking me back to my earliest memories. Im in my grandmother’s garden in Ukrainian village sandwiched between two ancient chalky mountains with their picks smoothed and leveled by aeons. We called them “waves” because they look like giant rolling ocean waves frozen in time, and because of “devil’s fingers” - fossilized remains of squid-like sea animals that cover mountain’s chalky sides after heavy downpours indicating that it was, long time ago, an ocean bottom.

It was kind of freedom only childhood allows you to have. There were absolutely no rules except to get home before complete dark. I could go as far as my legs would carry me, and in any direction. I could build tents out of sticks and cover them with giant leaves of burdock (don’t feed burdock to a cow, it turns milk bitter), showers were optional, and usually given only once when it was time for my dad to come and take me back home for school. My knees and elbows were always scraped and few dresses that were new at the beginning of the summer break were nothing but shreds, and too short to cover dirty underwear. “Grows like a weed” sighs grandma. “Yup” my dad agrees, picking up my suitcase full of dirty laundry, broken flip-flops, and devil’s fingers, making up things in his mind he’s going to say to my mom to explain my pitiful appearance.

I was probably about twelve when I realized that when people looked at me I cared what they see. And that’s when that freedom slipped away from me little by little. In my head memories change from sunshine filled childhood to anxiety induced teenage years, to stifling complexity of adult life. I recently talked to my mom about how complicated everything seems, and what an unimaginable tangle this existence turned into being. Her answer comes in an email: “Go back to basics”. I reached out for my usual “easy for you to say” but as I was typing it i looked out my window and it was snowing. And just like that, childhood wonder was alive again.    

…I am five years old with my tongue frozen to a door handle because I was trying to lick the frost off it. My aunt pouring hot water from enameled tea kettle to help thaw me from the door so we can all go inside and warm up. The tea cattle is midnight blue enamel with small white dots like distant stars, and for a tiny moment it feels like it’s a night sky I am peering into and not a stupid door with peeling paint.

…I am climbing to the top of the “wave”, a small human in a heavy coat and furry hat. I lay on my back in a snow, take a deep breath, and with a squeal I roll from the top of the “wave” all the way down, squishing the snow, bumping my knees and elbows on frozen ground, snow up my sleeves and down the neck of my coat - there is no stopping now, once you get rolling, screams and giggles and suddenly a smell of wild thyme through the snow where it’s less deep. I scrape the snow crust off and there it is, a woody stem with tiny green leaves and the smell of summer heat.

…I found a butterfly in a hollow of a maple tree. Everyone said it was dead but i carried it back home cradled in my dirty and freezing hands because i was afraid to break it if i had mittens on. Inside, i made a warm cosy nest next to a wood stove and carefully put butterfly in. I sat there staring at it, cherishing seeing this bright and fragile little creature in a harsh of a winter, until grandma called me to dinner. We ate borscht, rich and steamy, and small flatbreads pulled straight out of the oven of the wood stove and we were almost done when I saw my sister gaping at something above my head. I looked up and yellow butterfly was circling the lightbulb. It made three circles and vanished and when i turned around to make sure everyone had seen it too grandma was making signs of cross in the air. We never found the butterfly and we never talked about this.

…Life can be like an old cuckoo clock when it suddenly jumps at you with lots of nonsense and very little reason, overturning everything that you thought was set in stone, assaulting your every belief and shredding every evidence of common sense’s existence, before returning back into its crazy little house with padded walls, leaving you bewildered. You can’t fight chaos because it’s your anger that fuels it, and pulling out its teeth is pulling your own. You just took a step and made a turn and ended up on the other side of the looking glass. You’re not the one peering into the black glass surface, you’re the one looking out of it hoping to get back. Back to what buoyed you through tumultuous times, when the way of the heart was a clear sunlit path and your compass never faltered. Go back to basics, my mom said, and you will find it where you left it - along with cold midnight water, smell of wild thyme that erases decades, and winter butterflies.

XOXO and try to stay sane

Larysa