Butterfly Exhibits, Exhibitionists and Facebook

 

One of my young relatives likes to post comments about her workplace on Facebook. And yesterday I found my hypocritical side while reading one of them. As I read it I was thinking that she could get herself in trouble by letting her co-workers have access to her train-of-thought and then it hit me. Why you damn fool! I admonished myself, your blog is a hundred times more detailed than her two or three daily lines! What makes me think my blog can’t get me into the same kinds of trouble I’m worried about her getting into? Just because I’m older doesn’t mean I can’t inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings or throw down the gauntlet to a war of words I hadn’t intended to do. I may be older but that doesn’t automatically make me any wiser when I write for public consumption.

Like her, I used to be a hard worker with long hours and when I think back to the diaries I kept back when I was her age they are filled with those few moments during my days when my co-workers and I would have a little unauthorized fun behind the boss’ back. And whine about long hours and hard work? I did that too. Whine about my boss? Ditto. So I’m putting myself in the penalty box for forgetting that hypocrisy isn’t a flattering look for an old broad like me to wear.

Monday I went to a showing of 40 prints and drawings done by sculptors. Many of these art pieces were the preliminary drawings to the sculptures residing outside in the park. (See the photo above. It's a huge place covering many acres.) The show was held in a gallery near the annual Butterflies in Bloom exhibit that I’ve been going to since Don passed away, to honor all my April sadiversaries. I didn’t know what to expect since I had over-heard a couple of women talking about how the drawings should not have been shown in public, let alone in conjunction with an exhibit that draws so many children into the sculpture park. “Why, one of the drawings had a woman contorted in such a way that her ‘ya-ya’ was showing!” I had a pretty good idea what her ‘ya-ya’ was but I was visualizing a scene in an episode of Sex and the City---the one where Charlotte poses for an artist who was doing a series of vagina paintings. The gallery opening in Sex and the City was full of huge canvases of bigger than life, primary colored vaginas hanging all over the walls and the Sex and the City girls were trying to figure out which one was Charlotte’s.  

As I wandered the gallery at the sculpture park I kept wondering if the “offensive drawing” had been taken down. Most of the nudes I was seeing were quickie sketches, abstracts or light studies and far from titillating or in-your-face obscene---in my arty-farty opinion. Then I found it, a pencil drawing and it made me laugh right out loud at its understated presence. If I hadn’t been looking for a ‘ya-ya’---don’t you love that crazy euphemism---I would have missed it. 

After the seeing the prints and drawing I spent an hour in the conservatory with the butterflies. I had worn a red blouse that seemed to please the Common Morpho which are anything but common with their iridescent blue, flashing wings. They have a three inch wing spread and as soon as I walking into the tropical setting, several Common Morphos set their flight paths towards me and within a foot from landing on my blouse they saw the error of their ways and pulled upward, away from the “flower” that wasn’t. Around and around the conservatory they’d go, always reacting the same way to my blouse when they came near. I was a Common Morpho magnet the whole time I was there. If you happened to see my last year’s post about the Common Morpho you might recall I have a special bond with this subspecies of butterflies. In my twisted widow’s mind I associate them with Don’s spirit soaring. This year, it was like they were saying to me, “You’re back! We missed you!” I miss you, too, Don. It's good to see you so foot loose and fancy free from the broken body of your last twelve years on earth.  ©

Birthdays and Butterfly Tales

 

A few days ago I woke up to find the sky was crying its heart out. One could think: It’s spring and it’s just RAIN! No mystery or message there. Or the poet in each of us could say the universe felt my pain, the sadness of it being my deceased husband’s birthday. Looking at the world through the prism of our emotions and life experiences makes us hear and see things differently. Well, duh! No mystery or message there either… unless you have the soul of a poet or song writer or you’re a drama queen of a widow like I am. Then you see symbolism, analogies and paradoxes every where.

If I lived near an ocean I’d probably put a message in a bottle and send it off each year on Don’s birthday. The vastness of the water appeals to me. It’s a place where my tear drops could merge with a million other droplets and hide in plain sight. (Yup, only a drama queen could write that last sentence.) If I lived near the Badlands I’d probably wander around the buttes and spires seeking peace being out in the forces of nature that created them. If I lived in Alaska I’d want to be where I could see the pristine glaciers and tundra plateaus on Don’s birthday and in Florida it would the subtropical wilderness in the Everglades where I’d want to touch bases with the wonders of nature and my inner most thoughts on life and loss. But since there are no oceans or national parks near-by I went off to the Butterflies in Bloom exhibit, another place where if we listen hard enough we can hear our own hearts speak their Truth.

In the huge conservatory I sat on one of benches along side a brick path that meanders its way around the tropical garden and pair of Common Morphos---four-five inch iridescent blue butterflies from Central and South American---kept flying within arms length of where I sat. Around and around they went, always flying in the same direction as they circled the greenhouse. I learned later that this particular species likes to follow river beds and paths and the two butterflies were most likely males patrolling and defending their territory. If you read my March 31st post about my less than admirable thoughts should I find a pair of butterflies that seemed to speak to me more than the others flying around, you’ll be as relieved as I was to know that this pair won me over. They made me smile right down to my toes.

Last week I wrote the following quote in someone's blog comment box: “It's spooky sometimes how the universe seems to speak to us...how it always seems to know when we need to hear this or that to help us break through the silence and shame in our own lives or to touch bases with our inner most thoughts, dreams and memories. I have a theory, though, that those messages are always out there for the taking but we don't usually tune into them until we're ready to hear them.”

So what message do I think the universe was sending me this week? I’m not sure but it probably has something to do with the Common Morpho having pure black bottom sides and bright blue top sides and when they’re resting on foliage with their wings folded up all you see is their drab black coloring, but when they open up their wings and take flight you get treated to long flashes of iridescent beauty….kind of like we widows who are working on finding our way out of our sorrow. We get flashes of a rich life we could have back if we just have the courage not to huddle on the sidelines in our drab widow's weed too long. ©

P.S. For all the widows out there who have dealt with plugged toilets and are wondering how my appointment with the plumber turned out: my issue came about---this time---because the fill value was leaking causing the bowl not to fill up with enough water. Over time not enough water was going through the pipes to keep stuff moving. If you’ve ever had a plugged toilet that you can’t plunge through but it would go down all by itself 5-6 hours later, he called that a soft plug which is caused by low water flow and the plug point is usually lower in the pipes (rather than inside the toilet)---this was what was happening to me. I even got to look down the sewer connection in the basement when he checked to make sure it wasn’t a more serious issue than described above. I like my plumbing service. They don’t mind teaching you stuff as they work. Anyway, all is well again in my kingdom. My toilets flush and I didn’t kill an innocent butterfly.