Two separate stories have coalesced: there is my story of the Monarch Butterfly and there is my story of Baeleay Callister. Baeleay is an asentimental sentimentalist. My story of the Butterfly honed into a butterfly, one who I watched through all her life courses. I withnessed her birthing (though did not see here emerge from the light-yellow egg speck on the underside of the leaf. The mother's laying evenced no great struggle. There was the struggle of choosing the right leaf on the right kind of plant. They are very particular, very constrained in what sorts of plants they will partnered. After all the searching and selecting she pauses atop a leaf, her long abdomen apostropheed to the underside of the leaf, indicating possession. wings up, holding still she prizes out a singe egg adhering under the leaf.
There are things in this butterly story I will converse with Baelay about. So many questions arise, so many surprises. She mostly loves surprises. This is the most recent thing I llearned about Bealleay after I learned that she had died. She was seeing a naturpathic doctor to help her have a conversation with cancer that would kill her. Scott McQuitty told me the ND had told Bealeay that she was pupating, encased in a chrysalis, about to transition to butterfly.
So it is aprpopos that I would talk this story with Baeleay, this story about a butterfly whose life I followed; watched her munch an entire Mexican milkweed shrub down to bare nub. I was in negotiation with Butterfly in the time BC was running her negotiations; contemporaneity.
Baeleay was a sentimentalist when it came to bears but not much else.