The Last Butterfly of Summer

Filed in: Wild Ramblings | Writing

Every writer should have a summer like I did in 1971.

Unlike what you might expect, 1971 was not a coming of age summer. That had happened the year before, when my brother showed up at our back door in an army uniform. In fact, nothing really major happened in 1971. At least, not to me. The country was in an uproar, but calm ruled where I was. I didn’t lose my virginity or find a dead body in the woods. I didn’t find my soulmate or discover any type of secrets about being a woman.

What I did was daydream.

That’s it. Just daydream.

You see, I was at my grandmother’s house that summer. My grandfather had died the fall before, and I guess my parents thought I might be good company for my grandmother.

I was actually pretty lousy company.

Back in Nashville, where we lived at the time, I had a lot going on. Friends. I was in the band, and in love with rock ‘n roll. I wanted to be a hippie and go to war protests, and I’d written a few pages of a “novel” about a motorcycle gang. I spent a lot of time on the back of my neighbor’s Honda motorcycle, and I was beginning to see the appeal of “bad boys.” Exploring my sexuality by writing awful romance stories with a friend, I was madly in love with John Fogarty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cory Wells of Three Dog Night, and at least three of the Osmonds. And sometime that spring, I’d tried to run away to Los Angeles.

Did I mention I was fourteen?

OK, so maybe the trip south wasn’t just for my grandmother’s benefit.

Alabama in August is hot. Hell hot. Devil’s brew Tabasco sauce hot. And in 1971, my grandmother had no air conditioning, no indoor toilet, and a black-and-white TV that picked up two snowy channels out of Birmingham. Her radio picked up one station that played a lot of Johnny Cash and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. “The House at Pooh Corner” was one of their favorites.

My grandmother didn’t drive, and while we were only a mile from town, the road there was a busy US Highway with a lot of blind hills and non-existent shoulders. No way would she let a fourteen-year-old girl walk it alone. My great uncle, her brother, who had one glass eye and a thirty-year-old car with a ceiling that shed bits of felt when you touched it, would occasionally take me to the drugstore in town for comic books and cheesy novels.

Other than that, I was on my own.

I had expected to help my grandmother with her garden, but in August, there’s not much to do but water and wait. She’d weed, if it was needed, in the relative cool of the early morning, before I was awake.

The result was that I spent a lot of time on the front porch, listening to the radio, watching cars pass, and becoming completely enchanted with the tiniest bits of life. While my daydreams were epic adventures full of spies, romance, and rock stars, I found myself writing poems about bugs, chickens pecking in the gravel drive, and how every leaf on the mulberry tree is somehow unique. I watched dogs sleep, their muscles quivering in an infinite rabbit chase, and watch a snake climb the mulberry tree, muscles rippling in an almost inexplicable rhythm.

It was a summer of quiet, everyday sensuality, and forty years later, I still write best on the porch in summer, a fan keeping me cool, and the trees gently rustling around me. And it was on just such a heat-filled day, when the lack of stirring air meant I could hear dogs from almost a mile away, that an image and a book title became so imprinted on my brain that it’s stayed there for forty years. I had no idea what it was at the time. What the story was, or when or how I would write it.

I’ve tried over the years, but nothing has really worked. Until now.

* * *

I called her the last butterfly of summer. And that’s the title that stuck, the image that will be with me forever. She was small and yellow, flitting in that odd arrhythmic way that butterflies have as they dance around a bush full of flowers. In this case, it was a hydrangea bush, about the size of a small car. The leaves were bigger than both my hands together, and the blossoms were like cantaloupes. They were white, so she stood out, with her perfect yellow wings.

I waited for her to show up, which she did every day. She never failed to show, and she worked the hydrangea blooms like a factory worker. Steady, one at a time, and all of them. After the hydrangeas, she’d check out the vines on the fence row next to the house, then across the highway to the massive tangle of honeysuckle vines that were busily competing with the kudzu to take over the abandoned barn across the road. By fall, the kudzu would win, persistent little bugger that it is.

But in high summer, the honeysuckle still stood its ground, not wanting to give up. So there were still flowers high on the barn for my butterfly to investigate. I found myself watching for cars whenever she’d head that way, and she did almost become the bug on the windshield for a 1970 Mach 1 Mustang one horrifying afternoon.

She survived, however, continuing her daily dance until I had returned to Nashville. Hopefully, long after.

The reason my butterfly is important is that she’s a symbol of something most writers experience sooner or later. There comes a moment, sometimes an epiphanal “ah ha!” moment, when you realize you don’t see the world like everyone else around you. That you pay attention to things other people ignore while sometimes ignoring things most folks think are important. That realization is part of the writer’s journey.

Mine was not an “ah ha!” moment. It started with a butterfly, continued a few years later with a summer full of romance novels and mononucleosis, and continued to grow through a marriage, and a new acquaintance called the Internet. In 1999, a movie changed my writing world forever, and this summer, the summer of 2009, my life is changing again.

I’m back on the porch with the fan and the swing. My daughter has graduated from high school and I’ve left the day job. Abruptly, my writing hours have expanded exponentially. This time I own the porch, and it’s my responsibility to turn my daydreams into publishable stories. This is a true gift from God.

What I was thought to be deprivation of the highest order I now see was—and IS—a luxury. The porch, with no phones, no distractions.

Now I think that “the last butterfly of summer” was never meant to be a book title. It’s a writer’s journey, a full circle trip through the mind. The time and technology have arrived to share it here, and that’s what I plan to do.

I will certainly continue to share other things about my world and my life, and each of these entries will carry the defining title. I hope you will bear with me as I start the journey again, indulgent though it may be. Like my summer of 1971, it’s the little things that make up the epic tales of life.

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