Summer

By: Janet Borchardt

I walked out my back door, and instantly was hit by the humidity of the summer morning. The air was thick with smells of freshly mowed grass, blooming flowers, and morning dew. The low sun streamed across our yard, rising slowly through the thick haze of morning air. I walked through the grass, towards our prairie. My sandaled feet got pretty wet and grassy, as I patiently made my way through our lawn.

In my hand, there was a clear, washed out old peanut butter jar with a monarch butterfly, delicately designed with an intriguing mix of orange, black, and white, weakly climbing around and fluttering about inside. It had just become a butterfly. For as long as I can remember, my sister, Rachel, and I found little yellow, black, and white striped monarch caterpillars and raised them in a bright and safe sitting room in our house. To feed them, we placed butterfly milkweed leaves, oozing at breaks in the stem with nature’s white sticky milk, inside the jars with holes punched in the lid, so they can breathe. My dad has worked all his life doing all he can to keep pollinators, including the monarch butterfly, alive, because they truly fuel everything in this world. Rachel and I spent our young summers looking all over the expanse of our prairie for these little caterpillars, just so we could do our part to help out the Earth. This was belief I grew up hearing Dad talk about and spend his weeks working to help, and that I would develop too.

I walked the long, mowed grassy trails until I found a green, tall milkweed plant, its’ leaves cupped and shaped like an eye, to release the butterfly on. Before I opened the jar, I started to worry about whether or not this small creature would survive, or whether it would end up victim to a car or bird, like I had seen so many end up as before. I decided to move past this fear, because releasing it can make a small, but meaningful impact on the environment. I carefully unscrewed the yellow lid of the jar, and tilted it slightly until the monarch made its way outside onto the leaves of the milkweed plant. As I watched it crawl up the stem, I looked out to see hundreds of butterflies, bees, and dragonflies flying above the prairie grasses. The butterfly was no longer one, for it had joined this amazing population of all the creatures that sustain our plants and Earth. I had helped it through its weak and vulnerable stages in life, so it could make it to this important stage of its existence. The wind rustled through the golden and green native grasses and bright flowers, in their yellows and purples. Then and there, I gained an appreciation for how beautiful and special this place we call home is. The Earth has given us so much and I took on the belief that I would do everything in my power to fight to keep the Earth as remarkable as it was through my eyes at this moment.