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So, the other day I took the kids to the Butterfly exhibit at the zoo here in town. It’s pretty fabulous – an enormous glass dome, like a greenhouse on steroids, full of exotic plans and trees and koi ponds. It even has a catwalk around the second story level. And the big draw is that it’s full of hundreds of butterflies, flitting around the enclosure with the visitors.

We got there and the kids were enthralled. It was a sunny day and the butterflies were absolutely glowing – I kept thinking of that line in A.S. Byatt’s novella, ANGELS AND INSECTS, when Eugenia says that the butterflies are “like colored air.” There were blue ones and orange ones and charming little zebra-striped ones. The toddler was really into identifying the different species, and checking out the huge box of cocoons, hanging in neat line. I thought it was a little creepy, actually. It looked like a graveyard, the way the cocoons were arranged. Like tiny little coffins all in a row. Which they were, really, since metamorphosis is a sort of reincarnation – a death and a birth as much as a transformation. But now I’m getting off on a tangent.

Anyway, we went up to the second level to walk around the catwalk, high up in the sunlit air, and that’s when it happened. It was hot in the butterfly enclosure (since, you know, overgrown greenhouses tend to be sort of hot.) I’d taken off the baby’s jacket and was carrying it in my hand. It’s a cute jacket – bright pink fleece with little green and blue polka dots. Hibiscus pink. Orchid pink. Butterfly-food-source pink.

So we’re walking along, and this absolutely enormous black and fuchsia butterfly (one like the picture at the beginning of this post, a scarlet swallowtail) starts fluttering around us, dipping low over the toddler’s head, and circling the bulls-eye of the jacket in my hand. Two different families near us start oohing and aaaing. We were drawing a crowd.

That’s when it happened. The butterfly landed on the baby’s jacket, just a couple of inches from my hand. The families around us started pulling out cameras, and my toddler was doing this super-happy dance, announcing to everyone that we had a butterfly. Everyone was very excited.

Except for me.

Because after that butterfly landed, it started to walk. And that’s when it hit me.

Butterflies are just big-ass bugs.

I mean, yeah, the wings are gorgeous, but this thing had an onyx-black body the size of my pinky finger and these long, spiky black bug legs and all I could think was that if those legs touched my skin I was going to scream. In the meantime, I was trying not to ruin the moment for my toddler or any of the photograph-happy onlookers, but every inch of my being was desperate to fling the jacket, butterfly and all, over the catwalk railing. Instead, I pasted on an extremely forced and fake smile and twisted my arm half out of it’s socket trying to keep the butterfly from crawling on me because there is No. Way. I could’ve handled that.

Eventually it took off and I managed to stuff the jacket into my bag, but it still circled us for the rest of our visit, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up and giving me a bad case of the shivers every minute or so. (I’m actually shuddering just typing this out.)

So what does all of this have to do with writing?

It’s the “And that’s when it hit me” bit. Because somewhere in my writing, I can absolutely use the fact that for all their beauty, butterflies are just enormous bugs with pretty wings. But until that fluttering monster landed on me, I had no idea that butterflies had a creepy side. I thought I would love to have them on my hands. Decorating my hair. Crawling along my skin – okay. I can’t go any further with that, because it makes me want to scream just thinking about it.

The point is, that trip to the zoo was a perfect reminder of why, as a writer, it’s so vitally important to keep having experiences, no matter how small. Each new thing I do makes me see the world in a different way, and helps fill up the well of things I can draw on when I’m working. Because that’s all writers have to go on – what we’ve seen of the world. I don’t believe a writer will ever run out of material unless they get so wrapped up in their work that they run out of time to go live. I don’t have to travel to Africa (though I’d love to go.) I don’t have to climb the Matterhorn or break a Viscount’s heart.

But I do have to go to the zoo. I do have to pay attention to the worn, desperate look on the face of the woman who owns the struggling local bakery. Because that’s where the next sentences come from. The next paragraphs. The next books. The business of living is every bit as important to writers as the business of writing. I like to be reminded of that. It’s good for me.

It’ll be awhile before I get over that freaking huge bug, though.

Tags: bugs, butterflies, kids, writing