Papillon
by
Allison Gish
by
Allison Gish
Morning came and sun washed over mountains and tin houses with golden peaceful light and the sticky sweet air that took us all in like family. In this way the sun came to me in my small island hotel room, slipping past thin linen curtains and the peeling white windowsills. For a moment I sat with the sun and wondered what am I doing here? but then stood and let those thoughts fall.
Yellow-painted wooden steps creaked and cackled as I made my way down stairs, walking towards the promise of breakfast. A bowl of corn flakes and a chipped teacup met me at the pension’s breakfast nook. The old French woman who everyone called “Maman” sat with me and spoke of the island in peaceful, songlike measure.
“I came here for two weeks, with only a backpack, when I was 25 and I never left.” She explained, stirring brown sugar crystals into her tea. “I fell in love with this island and started working for the woman who used to own this hotel. C’est la vie.” She looked out over the sunflowers to the turquoise sea. I could see the water churning and the waves crashing in the reflection of her similarly brilliant blue eyes.
There were other young women at the breakfast table as well. They ate quietly with the occasional laugh or comment. It was that warm, familiar quiet inherent at a table full of mothers and daughters; a quiet that is born from an incommunicable mutual understanding. “Look at you all,” Maman chided, “I should rename the hotel ‘Maman’s home for vagabond girls.’”
The other young women left for beaches or winding jungle paths and Maman invited me to her garden. We walked to the backyard and the hot, salty wind seemed to push my ankles along, ushering me into this small oasis. Hundreds of butterflies floated through the garden like little orbs of light. They beat their tiny paper wings against the island breeze, perched themselves upon leafs and flowers, unfurled their wings to the sky and absorbed the energy of the kind sun above. Wide eyed with awe and joy, I turned to Maman and asked, “Where do they all come from?”
“I have no idea,” she replied, looking over the butterflies as if they were her children, “but they adore this garden and I am honored. They seem so holy.” A monarch landed on her shoulder and she smiled. She pulled up a nearby leaf, exposing a microcosm of a thousand tiny eggs. “They hatch from these eggs into small caterpillars. They eat the leaf and become it, in a sense—for the milkweed’s toxicity becomes the monarch’s protection from predators, too.”
“And if they are born to the wrong leaf?” I asked, my eyes skipping from one plant to the next, imagining miniature galaxies of butterfly eggs on each. “I suppose mothers just know to lay their eggs in the right place,” she shrugged.
We walked on and when she found what she needed, knelt on the dirt path to become level with the golden chrysalis that she now gingerly cradled. “When the caterpillar is fully grown its skin becomes a chrysalis which envelops its tiny body. After about two weeks it is reborn as a butterfly.” She reached over to what looked like a pinecone or a dried leaf. “This is the cocoon of what will be a moth. These little loves got the short end of the stick, if you ask me. They bake in their cocoons for six months, sometimes only to live as moths for five days. Mother nature forgot to give them mouths to eat. She is a wildly unpredictable woman.”
Misty drops of rain began to fall from the clear sky that the sun still held. Maman looked skywards. “Here she is now,” Maman laughed, extending her hands to receive the water, “blessing us with a clear morning rain.”
I sat back against a cool stonewall, letting the fine raindrops gather in beads on my hair and skin. I looked at the cocoon, which held an intricately spun organism, waiting for birth and for its five days on earth. I pressed my hands into my damp hair, into my throbbing sticky temples, embraced the familiar feeling that brought me to this place. How absurd is this all, I thought. Absurd are this trip and these moths and the random, spinning earth we call home.
Overcome with both an inane sense of trust for Maman and a dread of the chaos that had begun to unfold before me, silent tears escaped my eyes. “What am I doing here?” I asked, again, aloud, of nowhere in particular. She held me in her eyes as I delved into that gentle maternal gaze, searching there for some answer to my massive inquiry. “Ma cherie,” she replied, “you are learning!”
That evening I returned to my room to find on the bed a cracking leather bible, half open and emitting a half moon glow. I read what was underlined: “I will lift mine eyes unto the hills! ” I placed the bible down on the soft white sheets and floated over to the window, slid out onto the fire escape and crept down the dewy metal ladder, slipped past the absurd. I stood up on the garden’s stonewall and lifted my eyes onto the hills, lit by the waxing moon. “Mère Nature!” I exclaimed, teasing any meaning out of those mountains. The moths and I danced all night with our mother and her swinging full moon hips; we were learning to fall in love with not knowing as we spiraled the sun five or fifty thousand times.
*"Psalm 121." The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York: American Bible Society, 1962.
Allison Gish is a student at Scripps College. She is deeply infatuated with the relationship between nature and prose.
Yellow-painted wooden steps creaked and cackled as I made my way down stairs, walking towards the promise of breakfast. A bowl of corn flakes and a chipped teacup met me at the pension’s breakfast nook. The old French woman who everyone called “Maman” sat with me and spoke of the island in peaceful, songlike measure.
“I came here for two weeks, with only a backpack, when I was 25 and I never left.” She explained, stirring brown sugar crystals into her tea. “I fell in love with this island and started working for the woman who used to own this hotel. C’est la vie.” She looked out over the sunflowers to the turquoise sea. I could see the water churning and the waves crashing in the reflection of her similarly brilliant blue eyes.
There were other young women at the breakfast table as well. They ate quietly with the occasional laugh or comment. It was that warm, familiar quiet inherent at a table full of mothers and daughters; a quiet that is born from an incommunicable mutual understanding. “Look at you all,” Maman chided, “I should rename the hotel ‘Maman’s home for vagabond girls.’”
The other young women left for beaches or winding jungle paths and Maman invited me to her garden. We walked to the backyard and the hot, salty wind seemed to push my ankles along, ushering me into this small oasis. Hundreds of butterflies floated through the garden like little orbs of light. They beat their tiny paper wings against the island breeze, perched themselves upon leafs and flowers, unfurled their wings to the sky and absorbed the energy of the kind sun above. Wide eyed with awe and joy, I turned to Maman and asked, “Where do they all come from?”
“I have no idea,” she replied, looking over the butterflies as if they were her children, “but they adore this garden and I am honored. They seem so holy.” A monarch landed on her shoulder and she smiled. She pulled up a nearby leaf, exposing a microcosm of a thousand tiny eggs. “They hatch from these eggs into small caterpillars. They eat the leaf and become it, in a sense—for the milkweed’s toxicity becomes the monarch’s protection from predators, too.”
“And if they are born to the wrong leaf?” I asked, my eyes skipping from one plant to the next, imagining miniature galaxies of butterfly eggs on each. “I suppose mothers just know to lay their eggs in the right place,” she shrugged.
We walked on and when she found what she needed, knelt on the dirt path to become level with the golden chrysalis that she now gingerly cradled. “When the caterpillar is fully grown its skin becomes a chrysalis which envelops its tiny body. After about two weeks it is reborn as a butterfly.” She reached over to what looked like a pinecone or a dried leaf. “This is the cocoon of what will be a moth. These little loves got the short end of the stick, if you ask me. They bake in their cocoons for six months, sometimes only to live as moths for five days. Mother nature forgot to give them mouths to eat. She is a wildly unpredictable woman.”
Misty drops of rain began to fall from the clear sky that the sun still held. Maman looked skywards. “Here she is now,” Maman laughed, extending her hands to receive the water, “blessing us with a clear morning rain.”
I sat back against a cool stonewall, letting the fine raindrops gather in beads on my hair and skin. I looked at the cocoon, which held an intricately spun organism, waiting for birth and for its five days on earth. I pressed my hands into my damp hair, into my throbbing sticky temples, embraced the familiar feeling that brought me to this place. How absurd is this all, I thought. Absurd are this trip and these moths and the random, spinning earth we call home.
Overcome with both an inane sense of trust for Maman and a dread of the chaos that had begun to unfold before me, silent tears escaped my eyes. “What am I doing here?” I asked, again, aloud, of nowhere in particular. She held me in her eyes as I delved into that gentle maternal gaze, searching there for some answer to my massive inquiry. “Ma cherie,” she replied, “you are learning!”
That evening I returned to my room to find on the bed a cracking leather bible, half open and emitting a half moon glow. I read what was underlined: “I will lift mine eyes unto the hills! ” I placed the bible down on the soft white sheets and floated over to the window, slid out onto the fire escape and crept down the dewy metal ladder, slipped past the absurd. I stood up on the garden’s stonewall and lifted my eyes onto the hills, lit by the waxing moon. “Mère Nature!” I exclaimed, teasing any meaning out of those mountains. The moths and I danced all night with our mother and her swinging full moon hips; we were learning to fall in love with not knowing as we spiraled the sun five or fifty thousand times.
*"Psalm 121." The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York: American Bible Society, 1962.
Allison Gish is a student at Scripps College. She is deeply infatuated with the relationship between nature and prose.