Monarch Caterpillar Quotes

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick.

The (Milkweed) plants sat so vulnerable in ditches, the caterpillars never eating fast enough to keep the milkweed small and inconspicuous. It seemed inevitable that the plants would draw the attention of landowners who were oblivious to the architecture of life, and the monarch's habitat would succomb to mowing.

butterfly