The Silk Moth

Lily’s uncle Bob came to visit the summer after he found himself. Her mother said he had gone to California to learn how to be a better person. Her father said he wished that Bob would go off and lose himself again.

Uncle Bob had come back with a love for all things, whch meant every time he found an ant in the kitchen, he would chase it into a paper cup and carry it outside. He said it was wrong to kill even the smallest things (unless you really, really had to) because it was unkind. He even took away and hid the light her father had hung outside to kill mosquitoes at night.

“Why?” Lily asked him, after her father yelled about it.

“Because it’s wrong to kill things, even mosquitoes,” Uncle Bob told her.

“But they bite you,” she said, and scratched a new bump on her arm that a mosquito had just given her the night before.

“Many things need to eat mosquitoes to live,” Uncle Bob said. “Like dragonflies. Wouldn’t you be sad if there were no more dragonflies around?”

Since Lily was a little bit scared of dragonflies, she shook her head.

“What about frogs?” Uncle Bob asked.

Lily thought of the little green tree frogs that she found in the back yard, and smiled.

“You wouldn’t want them to have nothing to eat, would you?” Uncle Bob asked.

“No,” she admitted. “I just wish they would eat more of them.”

Uncle Bob laughed. “Another reason that we shouldn’t use bug lights is because of the moths.”

“The moths?” Lily thought of the brown moths that sometimes fluttered into the house by accident, that her father would chase around with a rolled up newspaper. “You mean the big brown ones?”

Uncle Bob smiled. “Yes, the big brown ones. But there’s other moths, too, that are very beautiful, almost like a fairy princess. Like the silk moths.”

“What’s a silk moth?” Lily asked.

“A big, beautiful white moth that looks like its wings are made of silk,” Uncle Bob said.

“I want to see one!” she cried.

“Maybe if we sit outside tonight and watch, we will,” Uncle Bob told her.

Uncle Bob must have been lucky, because that night, when they were sitting outside on the back porch, a gigantic, beautiful white moth came fluttering down where they sat. Lily almost thought it had come down just to see her, and then it landed on the window of the back porch and sat there, trembling.

“It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed, and ran to look at it more closely. To her surprise, it slowly began to change colors, until it was a pale green. like a new leaf.

“What happened?” she asked her uncle.

“It’s laying its eggs,” Uncle Bob said, and sure enough, when the moth finally fluttered away, there was a whole layer of small eggs on the window screen.

“What do we do?” she asked Uncle Bob.

“We wait for them to hatch,” Uncle Bob said, “and make sure that nobody touches them.”

“All right,” Lily said.

The next day, she told her father about the eggs, who frowned at her. “I was going to wash the window screens,” he said.

“But you’ll hurt the babies!” she told him.

Grumbling a little, her father promised not to touch the screen until the babies had hatched.

Every day after that, Lily went outside to check on the eggs. Every day, they looked the same, until one day when she went out to see them, they seemed to be moving. She called her Uncle Bob, and when he came out, there was a Daddy Long Legs crawling toward them.

“Uncle Bob!” she cried. “What if it eats them?”

“Sometimes some of them do get eaten,” Uncle Bob said.

But Lily was determined that none of them would. She ran inside, got a paper cup, and caught the Harvestman, knowing that was what Uncle Bob would do. Then she carefully moved him to the other side of the yard. When she came back, all of the babies, none of them bigger than a kernel of green rice, were crawling away as fast as they could in different directions. All except one.

“I think that one’s sick,” she told Uncle Bob, when the rest of them were all gone and it remained in the same spot.

“It might be,” Uncle Bob admitted.

“Can’t we help it?”

“Well, we could put it somewhere it would have an easier time finding food,” Uncle Bob said.

So Lily picked up the baby caterpillar, carefully, and Uncle Bob picked her up so she could place it on a very high branch of the apple tree. It slowly climbed up the branch, past all the curious ants, until it was gone.

Lily thought about the silk moth a lot after that. She especially thought about the tiny caterpillar she had helped, and wondered if it had grown up to be a moth. Sometimes at night she worried about it, but when she told her mother, her older brother laughed at her, so she didn’t speak about it anymore.

Then one night Uncle Bob came to her bedroom and woke her up. “Come look, Lily,” he said, and took her by the hand and led her outside. Sleepily, she stared where he pointed, at the apple tree at the edge of the garden.

There was a beautiful silk moth fluttering above it, almost as if it were waiting for them to notice it. As she watched, it slowly floated toward them, and then soared away, out of the yard, on the summer breeze.

“It’s him, isn’t it” she asked her Uncle Bob, in wonder.

“I think it is,” he said, and smiled at her.