princess mike, pt. I

It was the harvest season, and the butterflies were coming. They appeared twice every year; once at the planting, once at the harvest. It started off always as a white girding like coils of sun-dried snowflake on the undersides of rafters, roof-beams, moist fuzzy puffballs growing to fill the curved space beneath the mossy tiles with a glistening web, as if some delinquent baker had spent an anonymous night squirting blooms of silvery icing into those damp crevices. Day by day the whiteness, at first limpid as cotton candy, slowly multiplied, compelled by an internal force, like a mold growing everywhere on high all at once. There were the songs that said, "swollen lattice for the lettuce / break the drabness come and get us!" If you asked, the villagers would deny knowing what, exactly, it meant, or where it had come from, or why they were so fond of chanting at cobwebs. But of course, there is a reason behind every emergent phenomenon, and even as the fresh spring light glittered, or the summer light from carafe of sky poured, and the hands-joined circles whirled and the invisible caterpillars were gradually spun beneath the blankets of their furred cocoons into something more proper to the time of year, the fields waited expectantly, draped in pungent silence.