In October of 09, my son found a huge, beautiful bright green caterpillar. It was the longest and thickest caterpillar I have ever seen. He had 'rescued' it from some over zealous leaf blowers in a park nearby. With the help of the internet, we identified the caterpillar as a polymephus moth. We then put it in a container with some gauze and a maple leaf which is what we determined this type of caterpillar eats and waited to show it to his father, only to find that in a few short hours it had begun to spin itself a cocoon in the leaf we provided.

We had only planned to show it to his father and then let it go! When we researched further, a site that specializes in hand-raised butterflies and moths suggested that it might not emerge until the following spring, so we left it on the windowsill in south light for 6 months. To be honest, I had checked it often in the beginning months but after a while I almost forgot about it entirely except to dust around it! I was working at my desk one March morning when some movement caught my eye from the sill and a magnificent creature was clinging to the gauze, upside down and it's wings nearly touched the bottom of the container! It was, in fact, a Polymephus moth. When her wings unfolded, her span was about 7" wide and it had the most beautiful markings. I knew my son was going to be thrilled.

Why is this so poignant and touching to us? Well, beyond that fact that she is a magnificent creature, in the book that I had illustrated a year prior, I pictured a young boy holding a beautifully winged creature with markings of the sun rising. In those wings you can find the image of a family watching a sunrise if you look closely enough. When I photographed my son holding the moth prior to letting her go it struck me how similar this was to what I had already illustrated in our recent book. The image was from my imagination then. Here it was in living color. It seemed curious to me that the story had been written ahead of the event. It seemed like an omen of sorts.

In my mind, the book and the words of Doug Wood are about finding the miraculous and the spiritual in our lives and in the world around us. The sunrise is a metaphor of course. Here, my son was experiencing the very narrative that we described in the book. We were thrilled by witnessing the transformation in this tiny creature so intimately.

My son placed the moth with great care on the tree above where he found the caterpillar and we left her to call for a mate. Mid-March seemed early for her to be hatched as there were no leaves on the trees and we were even expecting snow, but she was expected to live only a week at most so we put her on the tree, waited, and visited! She survived, and moved only inches from where she was placed for 5 days. My son visited every morning and evening and we found her motionless on the fifth day on the ground at the bottom of the tree. It was quite a cold four days and we had hoped that she was able to complete her cycle. We were happy to find her little body, her wings were a bit battered but she was still in tact.

We had become quite fond of her so we brought her back home and placed her in a terrarium of organic things that we have collected over the years, abandoned nests and such, and to our astonishment she revived and laid about 125 eggs and then died. We have placed the eggs back on the grounds by the tree and continue to wait for the 14 days or so that the first instar caterpillars emerge. We will wait to see.