Eight Little Girls and Their Flying Nets

The thirty crepe myrtle trees in the parking lot at Furber mall have begun to bloom, branches thick with clusters of red violet. At their feet, agapanthas begin to fade, their long stems drying in the late summer heat. What’s left after the purple blossoms drop and seed are the stems, tough and fibrous, drying to a metal sheen. Those stalks of the lily-of-the-Nile are beautiful in baskets--flat silver rings, two rows wide, woven in with the binding mariposa stitch.

Goodbyes come early this year. Autumn must be just over the hill.

*

I remember the school-year Saturdays in the early fall when the Camp Fire Girls in my hometown sewed the softest net into the shape of wind sockets, attached them to the handles of used-up brooms, and headed out for butterflies. We were learning their names—the tiger and zebra swallowtails and the little white cabbage that fluttered over the finished summer gardens, the monarch, and the luna, that swallow-tailed soft green moth seen only on summer screen doors, drawn by the light, and never caught. Too rare for capture. Too beautiful.

We plucked milkweed along country dirt roads as we gathered our prey, opened the net with care into the jars of chloroform we carried. The butterflies’ brief lives ended there, cut shortsomewhere in the natural two weeks’ of their generation--their flight. We moved on to use them, poised on a bed of fluff we had dipped in sky blue dye or tinted pink for the setting sun. Tiny dried weeds we’d picked along the roadside lay on top of the soft backing, perches for the butterflies.

Under the glass of an old picture frame, we had made a tray with a country scene delicate as a Japanese print—all for the cost of a frame, a piece of glass, a little dye, and the small creatures whose names we would never forget.

Memory seals, along with the scent of drying weeds and the dust of a country road, the passage of those tiny flutters of life.