The Universe and the Butterflies

Full transcript of the My True Ghost Stories episode “The Universe and the Butterflies.” Listen to this episode.

Hello and welcome to episode 92 of My True Ghost Stories. Among the many things that I do with my life, my different jobs and being a medium and having this podcast is I have a garden. The focus of my garden was at one time vegetables and then it was pretty flowers and now my garden is entirely devoted to caterpillars. Caterpillars, namely host plants for caterpillars so that the butterflies can come lay the eggs on these plants and the caterpillars eat up the leaves and then they make their chrysalises and then they turn into butterflies. So to me, now having gone through a vegetable garden and a flower garden, now my garden is full of plants with completely eaten leaves.

And to me this is a beautiful sight. The more holes in the leaves, the better. I know it's a weird thing, but I just love these caterpillars and watching them turn into butterflies. So the plants that I plant, I just focus on three types of butterflies. I plant milkweed for monarchs.

I plant parsley, dill and fennel for black swallowtails and I plant violets for the frittalaries. And I really feel like I'm doing good for Mother Nature by providing these plants. And this story is about how the universe supported this plan in a very strange and interesting way. My transformation from a vegetable gardener to a flower gardener, to a caterpillar gardener was a slow, each phase took a few years. But once I settled on caterpillar gardening, that one has lasted, you know, like two decades now.

And the caterpillar gardening evolved. I used to love to just go outside and look at the leaves and there's this sort of upside down stance that butterfly caterpillar gardeners take where you lean over and you look at the underside of the leaves to see if you see any eggs or caterpillars. So that was what I used to love doing. And then there was one year when I had a really, really large amount of black swallowtail caterpillars on the parsley outside in my garden. And one day I stood there at my deck door and I watched a mockingbird come and land next to the bed that had all the parsley on it with all the black swallowtail caterpillars and I watched that mockingbird eat them all.

Every single last one of them. And so I decided I'm gonna start taking those caterpillars inside, which is a thing that people do. It's not insane. It's not like taking a bunch of bees inside. I said I'm gonna raise these caterpillars inside to keep them safe and allow them to turn into butterflies because there's lots of other food for mockingbirds, but it's hard to be a caterpillar and turn into a butterfly.

And we're not seeing as many butterflies as we used to so I decided I am going to save the caterpillars so that they can be butterflies. So I looked it all up online and there was a way to do it and so I started to make these containers out of a mesh laundry basket with a t-shirt over the top and the black swallowtail caterpillars would eat the parsley. I would put a plant inside there and then they would crawl up the sides and then they would make their chrysalis on the t-shirt and then I was able to just keep that over the winter and then they would eclose, which is the word, that I actually, I'm not sure how to pronounce, but I believe it's eclose, not eclose. They would eclose in the spring. And I still do this project when the butterflies eclose in the spring.

I bring them outside and I set them free as soon as they're ready to fly and I watch them fly out over my caterpillar garden and off into the distance. After a while, they're stopped being a lot of monarch caterpillars. So I wound up focusing primarily on black swallowtail caterpillars and I just started to give more and more of these laundry baskets with t-shirts over the top and it was starting to like fill up my whole living room and it was becoming difficult because it was just difficult because I would have to lift the t-shirt up and sometimes a caterpillar would crawl out and it was not a perfect design. And some years had more, some years had less and the story that I'm going to tell you today is about a year that had more. It was a very abundant caterpillar year.

So I had this caterpillar garden and I had a lot of parsley planted and I had a lot of caterpillars in the laundry baskets in my living room. So I went over to my boyfriend's house, my boyfriend who is now my husband. I went over there and I was telling him that I don't know how I'm going to manage all these butterflies. I can't just keep putting more and more laundry baskets with t-shirts on them. It's taking up the whole room, but I could not bring myself to leave the caterpillars outside to get eaten by birds.

So I just, I had to bring them in. It's like if I see a caterpillar, I have to bring it inside and then even if I saw a leaf with eggs on it, I had a way to bring that inside and then they would come out of their egg there and then they were really safe. So I just told my boyfriend, I don't know how I'm going to contain all these and I'm just going to have to keep buying more and more laundry baskets. And then I said, you know what would be perfect? I said, one of those like pack and plays, you know those portable play pens and I could get that and just set that one thing up and then I could put a bunch of parsley plants on the floor of it and then I could put some sticks and stuff and so that they could crawl up the sticks and make their chrysalises on the sticks and then I could just put a sheet, one sheet over the top and that I knew would contain a lot of caterpillars and then there wouldn't be any risk of them making a chrysalis right on top of the other ones which is why I had to have all these different baskets because like if there was too many caterpillars in there they would make chrysalises on top of each other and that didn't work out well because the butterfly inside the, it's a long story but that didn't work out well.

So I was telling him about this idea that I had that I was going to get a pack and place. I would like to have a pack and play. I was not obsessed enough to go buy a pack and play to put all these caterpillars in. That I would not bring myself to do. The laundry baskets, they sold for a dollar in the dollar store and the t-shirts were just old t-shirts that I had laying around so that was not costing me very much money.

But a pack and play, that was a whole other thing and I said I wish that I had one of those but I didn't. My children were out of play pen age so I didn't have a play pen around. When my children were crawling infants the main thing I used the play pen for was to put the Christmas tree in it so that they wouldn't not get over while they were crawling. But anyway, those days were over and I did not have a play pen in my house. So I was telling my boyfriend it would be so great to have one of these things.

And he said yeah that would be great but in the meantime now let's just go to the 99 cents store of the dollar store and buy you some more mesh laundry baskets and I have a couple old t-shirts that you can have. So we said great and then we were headed out. We were going someplace, not to the dollar store. We were going someplace and we walked down the four stories from his apartment and we walked out and I had walked into his apartment and it was not garbage night. So there was no garbage cans out.

There was nothing on the sidewalk. There was no free box or anything in front of his apartment. And we walked down the stairs and we started to head towards the front door which was all glass. And I'm walking towards the front door which I had just come in an hour before. I had, there was nothing there when I had walked in an hour before but I was walking out and I saw that there was something laying on the sidewalk.

It was weird. It was like this dark thing like and it was sort of on a diagonal in the middle of the sidewalk square. It was not up against the fence or in the curb or up against the car, anything. It was lying diagonally in the middle of a sidewalk square right in front of my boyfriend's apartment building. And so we walked towards the door and I said, what is that on the ground?

And we opened the door, pull it open and I walked out onto the little stoop in front of his building and there on the sidewalk, you know where this is going. Lying diagonally on the sidewalk square right in front of my boyfriend's building right where I had just been talking about how I could really use a pack and play to put all these caterpillars in. Laying there, it had not been there an hour before. Laying there was a big brown pack and play. And it had not been there when I walked in.

I pointed at it and I said, is that a play pen, which I knew it was but this was really freaky. It had not been there when I walked inside and it wasn't even like laying up against the fence like this was a free box or something or an offering. It was in the middle of the sidewalk and it was diagonal and it was right in front of his porch and it was exactly what I had just been saying would be nice if I could have this. And I was freaked out to the point of being scared I was scared of this and my boyfriend said to me, oh my God and we both said, oh my God, we could not believe that this had happened. I went over to the pack and play and I picked it up and it was intact and it was complete and it had the top and the bottom and all the legs and I said, okay universe, thank you very much.

And I realized that universe wants me to save all the caterpillars in my backyard and the ones I find around the neighborhood too I bring them home as well. Anyway, this is a story about how I put something out there and I think it was a positive thing, it was a good thing and the universe wanted this to happen and the universe immediately made it happen. Now, who put that pack and play there? I don't know. Why did they put it right there?

I don't know, did someone just get the urge to leave their child's play pen right in front of this building because they had a sense that someone upstairs was needing this, I don't know, but that's what happened. I used that pack and play for a few years to contain the caterpillars and I've moved on into other methods of smaller mesh butterfly enclosures and I have this whole new way of doing it now that involves sticks and anyway. If you're into that kind of thing, I'll put a link below to the Facebook page that I belong to called Raising Black Swallow Tales and maybe you could get involved in this as well. It is a super duper passion of mine besides being a medium and a mom and a wife, my caterpillar garden is one of my most prized parts of my life and I'm very glad that I'm able to help the butterflies and I am very glad that the universe supports this project. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of My True Go Stories.

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