It's Not Easy Being Greenie

A week or so ago our neighbor brought over a bunch of fresh radishes from his garden. Unbeknownst to our neighbor, he also brought over a soon-to-be much loved family pet. A small green caterpillar was nestled up in the produce and on discovery he was quickly transferred to a jelly jar with a cheesecloth lid. I gave him four to six hours, tops, but L and N's love was more nurturing than I'd credited, and "Greenie," as he became known, was well provisioned with samples of every leaf in our backyard. Variety is obviously the spice of life, or at least a general contributor, for in the abundance of delicacies offered, he found a couple that he clearly enjoyed very much.  We watched him polished them off day after day and grow quite plump in the process.

Worm Watch 2011!

All seemed to be going quite well until about a week ago. I came home to find the jelly jar sadly empty. "What happened?" I asked.

Stacy, my biology major wife, told me that Greenie had stopped moving a day or two ago. She gave him time, but it was clear he had died. "I just threw him out a minute ago."  She pulled open the garbage bin to show me.  Greenie was lying on the heap all hard and crusty.  At that moment the light of realization flickered in Stacy's eyes, followed by a mad scramble in the garbage to retrieve the cast-off cocoon.  This only served to knock it further down into the muck.   We pulled aside cantaloupe rinds and empty yogurt containers, paper towels and other assorted unidentifiables until at last we found the identifiable we were looking for. We delicately scooped out Greenie's immobile "body" and restored him to his jelly jar home, reattaching the cheesecloth lid and settling him in a quiet corner on the counter. Or at least as quiet as they get around here. He did look rather moribund lying clunkily on the bottom of the jar, but every once in a while, if you spent the time to watch, you'd notice a little spastic twitch that said that the spark of life had not departed Greenie just yet. Another few days and the twitching stopped and even I began to lose faith - though I could almost be persuaded that the little crusty green thing was a little bigger today that it had been the day before.

On Friday our fretted waiting was over. I came home from work to find nothing crusty on the jar bottom, and something light and feathery hanging upside-down from the cheese cloth. The florescent jade of the caterpillar had faded to wings of a palest green, like hydrangea petals. One wing was out, the other still somewhat curled up in the chrysalis hull. Another day and things were unraveled enough to do a more thorough examination. A quick internet search confirmed that Greenie was now a proud male Cabbage White Butterfly. Unfortunately is appears that his second stowed wing may be damaged or malformed and if so, I revert back to my prior predictions of life expectancy, but Greenie's obviously a fighter and has overcome plenty of challenges already in his short metamorphic life, so who can really say?

WAS

IS

(or some semblance thereof...)