Courtney

I drew a monarch chrysalis because we had a really beautiful personal experience with tending a monarch caterpillar all the way through to its its metaphor, all the way through its metamorphosis to its flying away from us that started out really exciting when we had a very scrubby little garden in the front of our apartment building when we moved in, and Sylvia loved it so much and brought it back to life and filled it with flowers and so much really wild and ragged and beautiful diversity. And then a monarch caterpillar arrived in our garden and formed a chrysalis right by the sidewalk. And I saw it one day, and I was very excited, and I watched it, and I watched it for a few days, and then I went out one morning and it was gone, and someone had cut the branch and taken it away, and it was heartbroken. And I thought, Who on earth would do such a thing? What? What kind of a person you know in community would go in and steal this living being from someone else's garden? But then a dear friend of ours found another monarch caterpillar in at the nursery where she was where they were working, and brought it to us in a little food container that had a piece of masking tape across the top that said mango on it. So we decided to name the caterpillar mango, and we built a little enclosure for it in our kitchen, and we fed mango milkweed leaves from our garden, and we watched them, and we tended them, and we cleaned their container and day by day. They munched and they pooped and they grew and they finally dropped into their position and we watched them hanging there and then we watched their bodies, split open and transformed before our eyes in into the chrysalis form and then we watched the chrysalis for many days solidify and turn colors. And eventually we saw the colors of the wings emerge through the outside of the chrysalis. And then we saw them emerge every step along the way we saw, we witnessed. And then we finally released them. And because it was really late in the season, we knew that this was one of the super generation that is the migrators. So as mango flew away, we thought, oh, off they go to Mexico, and maybe their children will migrate north next year. So that's why the monarch chrysalis, to me, is a symbol of hope. Yeah.