Heavity

on scaled wings

You can listen to me read this if you prefer:

I’m craving light-heartedness. Tenderness. Laughter. And, there is just no shortage of heavy right now. Front and center living in Kenya is Ebola next door and now the quarantine facility being erected here—against the will of the Kenyan people (2 dead here from protests, not the virus)—to hold and potentially treat Americans with a chance of exposure to Ebola. The equipment for this facility keeps arriving even though there’s a court order against its construction.

Bundibugyo Ebola. That’s the strain. Bundibugyo comes from the village in western Uganda where this strain of the virus was first isolated in 2007. It might as well be called the ooga-booga virus. Outside of Africa, if people even know about the outbreak, I suspect popular imagination looks like the movie Outbreak (with fewer cameos by Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, or, for that matter, PPE). Maybe this image lives alongside voodoo dolls and Apocalypse-Now-Heart-of-Darkness-skulls-on-sticks. Bundibugyo’s obvious branding issues notwithstanding, we can take heart that only 30-40% of people infected with the Bundibugyo strain will die (as compared to the 90% lethal Zaire strain). And, don’t worry, the U.S. is providing $13.5 million for Kenya’s Ebola preparedness efforts (I think this is in addition to the funds for the American-only facility that’s being built on Kenyan soil, but I’m not sure).

I feel heaviness when I read that the U.S. government just awarded a $5.1 million no-bid contract to cover four statues in Washington D.C. with 23.75-karat gold leaf. Maybe that gold originated in the artisanal gold-mining town of Mongbwalu in Democratic Republic of Congo where the ooga-booga outbreak is raging. Artisanal is technically the word for small-scale, but tends to lean toward child labor and look war-y.

Anyhow, I’m obsessed with Ebola, not because I think I’m going to contract it (this does not stop me from making excessive eye contact as I scan mucous membranes), but because we are in such a precarious global health moment on this planet already with the gutting of USAID and the CDC limping around as if from polio. As if?

I won’t go on more with the heavy. We need some levity up in here.

Or, will heavity work?

There’s a massive migration of the African White Caper Butterflies right now. Millions of these creatures float in the air and flutter on flowers, including dozens in our own backyard. These “soul birds” (loved this name for Butterflies, which I first read in Women Who Run with the Wolves)¹ have white wings with brown veins, and brown edges that frame white patches. Sepia monarchs.

A group of Butterflies is called a Kaleidoscope. This is among my top three collective names for animals (alongside Murmuration for a group of starlings and Bloat for a group of hippos). When you are inside a Butterfly migration, or when you see a cluster of them all together in a muddy puddle, you know this name is right.

I watch the kaleidoscope when I can’t respond to another email or make another budget or design another one-pager or write another grant. Or do one of the many (most?) things I don’t know how to do. Sometimes I focus my gaze on a single Butterfly.

I was deep in the land of KPIs (key performance indicators, for the uninitiated) when Clara came to me with a Butterfly sitting limp in her hand.

“Is it dead?” I asked.

“No, she’s alive. I found her in our driveway. I’m taking care of her.”

Nora ran up behind Clara and insisted that the Butterfly had been run over by a car. She did this by puffing out her lips, saying in a baby voice that drives me nuts, “Oh no! She got run ova by a caa!” Somehow, she still managed to sound sincere and sad.

Clara, hand on hip, voice dripping with Big-Sister authority said, “Noooraaaah! She would be dead if that happened.”

Clara showed me how the Butterfly’s wings blended in with the pattern on her flowered dress —and then named the butterfly Pattern.

Pattern started to stir. Clara’s face broke into a smile and her eyes lit up.

“Don’t you think Pattern wants to be free?” I said.

“I’m just taking care of her for now so she doesn’t get wet in the rain.”

It wasn’t raining, though dark clouds loomed.

I didn’t know how Pattern had come to rest in Clara’s hand, but she was holding this creature so dearly that I didn’t push any farther. Pattern seemed to be nearing specimen status anyhow.

Clara ran off.

Then, as I closed my laptop, Clara came back to report that she placed Pattern outside on some moss and under some bushes so she’d have protection.

“Do you want to see where I put her?” Clara asked.

“Sure sweetheart. Let me just put away my things.” I moved my computer and keyboard and mouse indoors from my outside office—my Kaleidoscope studio—and followed Clara around the side of the house.

Pattern laid on a bed of emerald moss, under some low-hung plants. Next to Pattern sat a heart bead charm. I breathed and set a piece of my real heart alongside it and we went inside to make dinner.

“Hopefully, Pattern will fly away,” Clara said, her face full of worry.

“We can check on her in the morning,” I said.

The next day, bed-headed and rubbing her eyes, before a greeting or a hug, Clara asked me if we could check on Pattern. We returned to find the heart charm and no Butterfly.

Clara’s eyes kaleidoscoped and she sprang up.

“She did it! I knew she could do it!”

Then, for reasons I don’t know, but do understand, Clara crouched again. She moved one of the leaves from a nearby plant. On the ground lay pieces of wings. A broken Pattern.

Clara stood up and melt-whimpered into my stomach. I crouched down and held her too tight. I blinked and looked up.

“Pattern got to spend her last hours on this side of the Earth with you, Clara,” I said.

She gently picked up some of the broken wing pieces and asked if we could keep them. I picked up another.

Some of the brown and white scales from Pattern’s wings flaked off on my fingertips and I wished I had gotten tweezers for the job.

“Do you think Pattern was happy that I took care of her?”

I looked up and blinked some more. And from behind the dawn blanket of clouds, I noticed the sky getting lighter.

“Yes,” I said.

❤️Becca

1. If you identify as a wolfish woman/wolf-curious, consider this a four-out-of-four-paws-20-claws endorsement of the slow reading community of the book Women Who Run with the Wolves stewarded by the amazing Christina Rivera (Author).