I pulled out my extra warm woolen sweaters from basement storage the other day, and as I was wriggling into the brown knit pullover several small white larva dropped to the floor. The wool moths were emerging. I’ve placed paper traps all over the house in hopes of catching the tiny creatures before they make swiss cheese out of all my sweaters and Peruvian hats and fine wool textiles and rugs and whatever I’ve forgotten is fine dining for moth larvae. But I never catch them all. Still, this is the first time I had met their unmetamorphosed brethren in their gourmet cycle. It had not really occured to me before that these small creatures live in distinct and separate modes, one growing, eating and barely mobile; the other quite ethereal, never eating, nearly always in flight, and in search of a mate. While the paper box trap is collecting winged specimens on top of the refrigerator, moth worms are simultaneously eating their way through great grandmother’s petit point chair cushion.
Butterflies get all the glory. They are beautiful and moths are a nuisance, or at least just mostly dull. But humans are mainly used to thinking about a linear form of existence where the eating and procreating and learning and growing are all of a piece – and all in one body. We have little understanding or appreciation of the different forms that one life cycle can take in nature, and may never even notice the metamorphoses taking place all around us.
I think about this now, because of my sweaters and also because of my friend who is working hard at dying in a bedroom not far from where I sit this evening. I say working hard because she – herself and her body – are strenuously exercising an amazing, some might say grotesque, metamorphosis. I have sat by her bed and looked upon this unwished for transformation with fear, dismay, and finally wonder. She is there just as she always was, and not there in entirely new ways. I see her beneath the veil of physical form, within her chrysalis, working toward something new. I do not doubt this new thing will spread wings and carry my friend away. In this new form she will not need to eat, or buy running shoes, or go to the office, or worry about the war in Iraq. She will have completed her metamorphosis, and that is all she is required to do.
I did not think about these things as I sat by my friend’s bed looking out the window on her garden. I did not think anything. I stared at the grey winter garden and the grey fogged sky until I noticed pink panicles hung like tiny chandeliers from the nearly bare branches of the wild currant. They came earlier than usual this year but Mary’s wild California currant was blooming.