The Butterfly
Introduction: To Madison Yauger, flowers and butterflies go together like biscuits and jam. Her family has always thrived in the garden, but after her grandfather passed away, butterflies began to mean a little something more.
I like to think that the souls of those we love linger in our world through nature. My mother is an avid gardener. When I was a child, I would watch her through the window, entranced by the process as she planted scarlet, mauve and ivory-colored geraniums and zinnias. At our house in Jacksonville, she would spend hours in the dirt, her fingernails encased in soil while the sun rays beat down on her back, tattooing her skin with a constellation of freckles.
Her father, my “Pop” passed on more than a green thumb, but that’s the trait they always bonded over. Our garden doesn’t begin to compare to the lush floral forest that lived behind my grandparents’ house. When I close my eyes, I’m transported back to elementary school years, eating frozen treats on the back porch and watching my Pop in his playground. You could smell the fragrance of camellias drifting in the breeze that passed through the screen porch on hot summer days. That garden was his retirement child. He labored day in and day out, tending to each bud and bloom. I used to skip across the cobblestone walkway that led through the labyrinth of flora, an explorer on a mission to seek out my Pop. He had a quite a few adventures back there. Once he got into a scuffle with a hidden hive of bees and had to take refuge at the bottom of the pool until the colony returned to their nectary bliss. He once waged war against the albino squirrels whose presence terrorized the birds that decorated his paradise. When he took up the birdseed they snacked on, they rebelled by chewing through his doorbell wire instead. The squirrels weren’t the only creatures allured by the mystical essence of that garden. There were often butterflies, too.
Almost a decade later, my mom can still be found digging up earth, but now that I’ve left home, she has a different audience. After my grandfather died, a monarch butterfly appeared in our yard. My mom had seen an article not too long before, that discussed the butterfly’s symbolism. Monarch butterflies supposedly represent resurrection and the soul. As the butterfly sailed around her head, she thought of her dad. For the last seven years or so, the monarch butterflies have returned. I’ve seen the orange, white-speckled and black-rimmed wings take flight off the hanging plant that sways over the flower beds, circling in the air before disappearing into the wind. I don’t think my grandfather was reincarnated into a monarch butterfly. I just feel his presence when I see one float by. Any time my mom finds herself playing in the dirt with her watering can, gloves and shovel resting nearby, those butterflies show up. She says it’s uncanny.
