When I sit out on the back verandah of my unit, butterflies often come near me, yellow ones and orange ones. I want them to land on me, but I don’t seem to have the attraction that St. Francis had for birds. They come very close to landing, but then they fly up and away.
I love to watch the butterflies. They fly fast, but they sometimes don’t seem to like one another, much like some humans. They have excellent vision.
When our daughter and her husband were missionaries in Ecuador, we visited them, and they took us to a butterfly farm in Mariposas de mindo. There, we saw over 1000 colorful butterflies, circling all around us like constellations. It was a wonderful experience.
According to the Smithsonian, there are about 17,500 species in the world and around 750 in the U.S. The names of common ones in the U.S. are the Buckeye, the Painted Lady, the Purple Wing, the Great Southern White, the Cloudless Sulphur, and the Little Sulphur. They group with other bugs into six families. We saw many beautiful butterflies in Papua New Guinea, including a bright blue one with a long Latin name (Papilio Ulysses Autolycus M A1 Papua New Guinea). One M.A. thesis student I supervised gave me one (dead of course) encased in a clear plastic box. You can buy them for $25 online.
Butterflies group with moths, and both groups have scales on their wings. The larvae of both groups come from caterpillars which, when molting, may shed their skin four or more times, with each molt often changing their color.
Butterflies are important for the cross-pollination of plants, but they can also eat rotting fruit and some plants, so all plants may not love them as much as we do. They are not mentioned in the Bible, although “butter” is three times. For example, David and others ate “honey, butter, sheep, goats, and cheese” (2 Samuel 17.29), and we read elsewhere (Psalm 55.21) that someone’s words may be as “smooth as butter.” If someone has ever tried to “butter you up,” you will know what the Psalm means.
Butterflies can even get into your stomach if you are very worried about something. On the other hand, you can go on chasing butterflies if you spend a lot of time hunting things you love. I read that “if you smile when you see a butterfly, you have happiness in your soul.”
I grew up on a farm, and we made butter by churning skimmed milk (see also Proverbs 30.33). When we were done, we also had buttermilk. Have you ever had any to drink? It is not something you would give to your darling children, although I can remember drinking it. Usually, however, we fed it to the pigs. They seemed to love it.
There are different kinds of churns used in making butter. Ours was barrel-shaped, with a paddle inside. The milk was poured into the barrel, and the paddles had an outside handle attached. My mother told me that if my brother and I turned the paddle fast and backward, we would get ice cream, but all we ever got was butter. We were slow learners.
If someone can’t hold on to something and it slips out of the hands, you can say the person is “butter-fingered,” meaning clumsy. However, if something is your “bread and butter” it helps you make your living and is where the bulk of your money comes from. On the other hand, if you profit from two things at the same time, you are “buttering your bread on both sides.”
We had a lot of buttercup flowers in Pennsylvania, and they were always a beautiful yellow color and found in the meadows. Cows won’t usually eat them, but they spread rapidly and are a source of food for bees and hummingbirds. We would hold them under someone's chin and note the yellow reflection. It now reminds me of a brighter version of hepatitis.
Some buttercups, like the Persian, are sold commercially, although we did not have that kind on our farm. Those we had in the meadows and lawns would sometimes get tall but in general, ours were short and could spring up almost anywhere there was grass.
Have you ever heard the slang “suck it up, buttercup,” which is meant to exhort someone to do something difficult without complaining? I sometimes need to say that to myself.
Remember when Mohammad Ali said he would “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!”? He did, too, as he floated around the boxing ring, stinging his opponents with his boxing gloves. His fighting skill was a little different than the poetic assurance that says, “butterflies are like angel’s kisses sent from heaven.”
Butterflies don’t start their lives with pretty wings and colors. They are bugs and must undergo a transformation, and so must we.
Karl Franklin
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