And Then There Were Ten: A Southern Love Story

After selling my family home, I moved to an apartment on Nashville Avenue in New Orleans, next door to my children's nursery school teacher.

She would bring me fresh flowers from her garden daily to encourage my painting hobby. One day she brought me two Monarch caterpillars in a mayonnaise jar, one fat one not. I sat for hours observing these strange creatures, eating voraciously, crawling into a "J" formation, knitting a silk thread from which they would hang for a day or two, excreting a green substance which would become their home for the next ten days. Magically, the green pupa turned translucent and a beautiful Monarch butterfly appeared. This process cannot succeed with interference. The changes were miraculous and I soon understood that real change has to come from within.

Like the butterfly, people have to grow and develop on their own. That was thirty years ago and I have been planting milkweed and raising Monarchs ever since.