My favorite nature writer, Sharman Apt Russell, posted a New Year's photograph of a butterfly on her Facebook page - a quaint snout-nosed butterfly. It was a very pretty photo, too, so here I am, inspired to wish you all a Happy 2016 with a butterfly photograph of my own.
It's not my best photograph. Actually, it's my first of a butterfly from my garden. It's from late November 2003, right around Thanksgiving (another beautiful holiday for reflection, perhaps about blessings rather than the New Year tradition of goals for the year to come). It's also a picture snapped around the time of the fall monarch migration, and the garden's milkweed was LOADED with monarch cats.
This first photograph is film, not digital, of a monarch, emerged in a pre-cat house tank, pasted into a pre-Confessions-blog-and Facebook-page journal. It's a beautiful journal, purple cloth cover, ribbon bookmark with a bead, decorated with poetry I found and stickers given to me. It's a journal about my garden, its beginnings, the people who were around it or knew of it, and the loads of e-mail correspondence with a dearest friend and fellow bfly gardener (hullo, Amanda). The journal is heavy, too, the heft from all the film photographs pasted inside.
So, Happy New Year from "Male Monarch #1" (pre-name-game), and a BCA wish for you to have a year full of awesome confessions.
