Tiny flecks of ice hit my face and remind me how new I am to the North. The wind makes my hands tingle a bit, making it a bit too cold for April if you ask me. At least it's not as cold as it was that one day in February, that's for sure. Back then I had just started walking home from school. I trudged about as fast as the still-sludgy snow would let me; even then, the wind made me feel like I couldn’t make it the whole way home. That is, until I met Chloe. Chloe lived halfway between school and my house, a good 20 blocks apart. I didn’t walk with her at first. It took a few awkward walks past her or lingering behind her until she finally said, “Hey, you’re new, right? Do you live far?”
From then on our talks made the cold walks home go much easier. I hated it when she would duck into her house at the halfway point and leave me to rough the painful weather alone. After some of the snow melted in the afternoon, a strange sight started to jut out of where Chloe went to after we split ways. It was a townhouse like mine, but it was much bigger and looked more like a blown-up version of those “rustic cabins” in the time-share brochures my parents now get in the mail. I was fascinated by the outside of it and wondered why it was wooden when all the others around it were brick.
But that one day in February changed all that. On that day, all we could talk about in between wind blasts were how worthless tying rackets under our shoes would be in snow this thick and how perfect a hot cup cider would after all this. When it came to the halfway point, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep going. The snow from the blizzard (“A record-breaker!” I heard the voice on the radio shout later that day) weighed down on us to make us feel snowed-in in the middle of the street. Even so, I followed Chloe up the steps of her townhouse.
When she invited me in, I said, out of reflex, “Nnn-no, I sh-should get home soon.”
“Stop being silly, and come inside,” she said, opening the door.
“Th-thanks,” I said shaking part from freezing, part from excitement.
The inside of the house seemed like a different world. Right when I walked in a uniform smell of incense, fresh-brewed coffee made me feel at home. Different from my house, it felt warm enough to take off my coat right away. I looked further into the home as I shook the snow off my pea coat. Round images painted the hallways branching off the main antechamber. As I followed Chloe in, I could see more detail to their colorful walls and saw what made these shapes so unique: butterflies.
“So what are these beautiful pictures anyway?” I asked.
“Oh those? They’re actual butterflies; our family has a long tradition of collecting them…”
“Our family has been collecting them since it became a popular hunting sport in the early 1800s,” a more mature woman’s voice crept into our conversation.
Before I could react to this new voice, I was already enchanted by a frame labeled “The Brush-footed Butterflies: Nymphalidae” and had moved in for a closer look. One butterfly, a tortoiseshell, I could swear was turning into a baby bat: It had what looked like brown fur on its back and tiger-print wings with a blue lacey-looking edge. Another, this one a glasswing, had a mosquito for a body and was not only green like a leaf but with smudges of white here and there to give it a dewy look. Another, a morpho, was solid blue, so solid that it reflected light through the glass casing… or rather, casings.
Inside the frames each butterfly was caught in its own glass bubble. The bubble (what Chloe called a “look”) looked like someone split a big magnifying lens and glued them back together with a butterfly trapped in the middle. Chloe explained that the lenses were in fact magnified 1.5 times, when I told her that. Each frame had a group of two or three or five looks. Each look had a label that said what type of butterfly it was and how it lived. Granted, I never liked butterflies that much; always thought they just looked like ants with wings. But between two magnified lenses, these butterflies were worth a lot more than a dead bug stuck in between a main window and a storm window. The frames helped give me a sense of how artistic nature could be, how it could create a splatter-pattern on each butterfly different from the last but stay in the same general form.
I never got a formal tour of the house. Instead, I collected what I know now about butterflies in tidbits. Even though they had over 200 butterflies scattered around the house, I found myself standing over the same frame of five whenever I came back. For some reason it seemed the least ordered of the groups since it didn’t follow any order of family, genus, or color. Yet it did follow a pattern: a red punchinello, a yellow and orange jezebel, a green glasswing, a blue morpho, and a violet morpho. A rainbow. Chloe had organized that frame for her mom when she turned 45. I could tell she was proud of it, and I had a sense she liked that frame the most too.
Chloe knew a lot about butterflies; she could quote off the top of her head most of what I had to struggle to read. Every once in a while, when we were playing in the snow or just sitting around, I’d quiz her, just for the hell of it.
“What’s the North American Monarch?”
“(D. Plexippus) like many of the genus Danaus, this species migrates northward during the spring and summer and southward during the winter season...”
I always thought that was smart of them, at least they have enough sense not to come up north when it’s freezing cold.
“The average Monarch lives for approximately 4 months, all of which it spends traveling a great distance to reach its final mating and resting place.”
“Show off,” I’d snicker and then ask another one.
Chloe also knew the entire process of catching and trapping butterflies. The trapper would first catch one with a net then close it in a box until it suffocated to death. Suffocated to death! It’s weird enough that a butterfly would need to breathe, much weirder that, knowing this, the person trapping it would choose this terrible way to kill it. After that they’d weld a look around it and then put it in a frame. “It’s simple; I’ve seen it done many times,” Chloe explained. But to Chloe the word “simple” didn’t mean the same that it did to me. To her, I guess, “simple” was anything she didn’t have to pick up a pencil and work out on paper to understand.
It was probably because of the way she was raised. Chloe told me both her parents were professors. They were in the same university, and they met because they both liked Germanic studies, Chloe said. I had seen her dad, Mr. Einer; he didn’t talk as much as Chloe did. At first, I thought he talked to himself more than to other people. One time I saw him linger by their grand piano with such a dazed look on his face, reciting what I later recognized to be a line of poetry: “There needn’t be a rose garden to grow a rose—.“ I imagined he spent a lot of his time there with Chloe’s mother, reciting lines of poetry off the top of their heads to each other. Now his got no response. I hadn’t seen Chloe’s mom up to that point at all. I guess I wrote her off as busy at first. My dad is busy like that. When I got curious and asked about her mom, Chloe said,
“My mom’s on sabbatical writing a paper on bath-foy-er.”
“What’s bath-foy-er?” I asked.
“He’s a poet from the Netherlands who wrote a lot of poems on tulips and things.”
“Really? Cool…What’s ‘sabbatical’?”
“Well, my mom told me it’s like ‘Sabbath,’ you know, the day of rest… but a lot longer.”
It didn’t take long until I was invited over for dinner. When I asked my parents if I could have dinner at Chloe’s, they were thrilled that I had made a good friend so fast, even though I was still feeling a bit uneasy about the newness of it all. It surprised me how quick they were to say yes: I had such a hard time just getting them to let me walk back from school alone. I wanted to walk home to see what the way would look like outside of the car for once. So when I started walking home after I thought I’d finally convinced them, who was there waiting for me in the first intersection? My mom, of course. She let me go it alone eventually, but not until I heard fuss over and over again: “Of course you should be able to walk home alone but it’s cold and the city streets are just not safe for a 10-year-old girl” and so on.
After calling Chloe, I headed over to her house in the late afternoon. A thin layer of frost still covered the branches on the trees. The river I cross over on the way home, the same one I’m crossing over now, ran white. “That’s something the city puts in the water to keep it from freezing,” Mr. Einer said when I asked Chloe about it at the dinner table.
“Really?...” I said and thought of asking why they don’t just let it freeze, but I stopped myself before I could.
I think it was at that moment when I looked down at the table and noticed what made Chloe’s family so different from my own. It was the dinner table. The dinner table at my house is terrible; it’s made out of glass. It’s a pain to eat on. Whenever anyone bumps the legs even a little bit the whole thing gets out of balance, and we have to get up and shift the table-top back in place. That’s why we never use it, except on those rare red letter days of New Year’s Eve and Christmas. Theirs was made of wood, so it doesn’t have that problem. It also felt nice to run my fingers across the surface—tracing each groove—without the worry of leaving greasy fingerprints on the glass.
When we were halfway through our meal, Mr. Einer chuckled and said, “Don’t you know it? I left my food in the fridge at my office again.”
“Are you going to throw it out?” Chloe asked in her motherly tone.
“Now, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“You’re going to eat food that’s been in the fridge for four days?”
“Well, uh, I usually do…”
“What kind of food is it?”
“That chicken curry we had last week.”
“Chicken? That goes bad quick—you might as well throw it out.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” he chuckled again. “But who knows, if I get hungry enough I’ll eat just about anything that’s a few days old.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’ve been hungry enough before to eat food that’s a few weeks old even…”
“Yeah, me too,” I agreed.
“Well, that’s a bit too long,” Mr. Einer said. “I’d throw it out by then if I were you.”
Who would’ve thought that dead butterflies could move? I noticed something wrong about the pictures in the hallways before dinner. I look through them one by one afterward and found out what it was: my favorite frame was missing. All the ones around where it hung were shuffled around too, probably to make it all look even. Has it been moved? I wondered, fighting an urge to go through every room in the house to find it. It was weird but I felt entitled to see it. It almost felt like the day wouldn’t be complete without a good look at it.
The next day I got my chance to look around. I got Chloe to play hide-and-seek with me. When it was her turn to hide, I searched through the walls more than the closets. In one room I found a nice frame of metalmarks I hadn’t seen before. They had shiny spots on their wings, and to tell the truth that was probably the only thing that separated them from moths. But there was no trace of the frame anywhere, which is what brought me to the door of the study.
I never remembered seeing that door open, so I guessed that was where Chloe’s mother was busy working on her paper. I debated whether to go in there or not. On the one hand risk disturbing her mom to find the frame, on the other using the game as an excuse (even though I knew Chloe wouldn’t be hiding in there). I figured it couldn’t hurt to look. If the frame was anywhere in the house, it was probably in there. I opened the door and walked into the room.
The study was completely empty. On the walls, instead of butterfly there were pictures of who I think was Chloe’s mom. The study was empty and her mom was neither there nor anywhere in the house. I didn’t think much about it then, but Chloe made it clear to me that the frame I was looking for was actually moved to her mom’s gravesite. I guess she thought her mom should have it with her since it was made for her in the first place. I leaned later that her mom had cancer. She took a sabbatical to work on her paper, but I don’t think she ever finished it.
On the desk there was pen rested on a paper. The paper had the title “Early Urbanization of Romanticism by Ewoud Von Bäf-fuer” typed across the top. It had lots of lines of what was probably Dutch followed by what probably a translation. It looked like a poem. Pen marks on margins pointed to words in the original that apparently had more than one meaning: “wort van de bomen” = “root of the trees” or “root from the trees”? Arrows pointing this way and that made a real mess of that page. It turned out it was all for a lecture Mr. Einer was going to give in an auditorium of his university the following week. He invited both Chloe and me to watch, and I couldn’t refuse to come. Ever since Chloe told me about her mom, I wanted to be there for her.
[I’m still working on Mr. Einer’s lecture, but it is basically an enthusiastic reading of some of the poet’s work that shakes up the narrator and Chloe.]
I never heard so much enthusiasm put into analyzing words. I guess this is why he’s a good teacher; this is probably why Chloe’s mom loved him and at the same time why she spent the most of her life studying this poet.
She looked so out of it as we walked back home from the university. It was still quiet while we sat in her living room. She told me then about her mother. After that she said, “My dad said we’re moving next week. He found a place on the other side of the University.”
“What?!...are you still gonna go my school?”
“I don’t know…”
But that didn’t matter. I knew she wasn’t going to be there at her house any more, and our walks wouldn’t ever happen again. I kept looking at her as she shook more and more with every breath. It was then that we collapsed into each other like two patterns on a falling blanket, and I cried with her for the next few hours.
It’s been a long few months. This is my first walk alone in a long time and it’s really helped me sort it at all out. Good, I can see the door of my house down the street now. When I start to unlock the door, my mom, who is leaning out of the window to smoke, catches my eye as she says, “Hey hon’, how was school today?”
“Hi mom,” I respond. “It was fine.” I walk into the house, not sure what else to say to her. Maybe one day, after I really sort all of it out, I’ll know what to say to her.
-TM
