A Reverence for Moths

The coin-sized moth lay flat against the front door, its paired wings curving gently like Peter Pan collars. I almost didn’t see it.

I had crossed the yard, climbed the front steps, and taken the porch in three long strides, my thoughts on a million things, when something – It may have been Owen darting between my legs hustling to get inside or the singular flash of light that blazed through an opening in the pines as the sun reached the horizon. – interrupted my daydreaming and I noticed it, inconspicuous and still.

The moth was creamy white and pale tan, the colors mixed softly and unevenly into less a pattern than a smear. It made me think of bleached camouflage or butter pecan ice cream softened by summer. It looked nothing like the moths I generally see around Sandhill – the tiny white ones flapping against the porch lights, the occasional buckeye that makes me feel as if I am being watched, certainly not the rare luna whose celadon wings shine in the darkness.

I pulled out my phone and took a photo in the nature identification app which may well be the best thing about my smart phone. It took only a couple of seconds for my moth to be identified: Pale Oak Beauty.

I nearly swooned. What a beautiful name! What an evocative name! What an absolutely perfect name!

I could have stood there longer, but – as mentioned – Owen was trying to get inside and I had mail in my hands, so I left my Pale Oak Beauty to his paleness and his beauty and went inside. I did not, though, stop thinking about him. In fact, it’s been nearly two weeks and I haven’t stopped thinking about him.

This is not unusual behavior, of course, for a woman who, decades after building toad-frog houses in the damp fall dirt and building forts with pine straw still brings inside abandoned nests and lost feathers and discarded acorn caps to show off in bowls. It is not odd or strange or questionable. It is necessary fascination with and appreciation for the vast creation that exists outside these tiny, tenuous shells in which we travel, these ever-diminishing things we call bodies.

So, amongst the bill-paying and the sheet-changing and the grocery-shopping, I have been marinating in the way the moth clung to the door without the slightest sound or movement, the way his body could hardly be distinguished from his glorious wings, the ways those wings mimic so amazingly the bark of the scrub oaks in the branch outside my back door. I have been wondering about the human being who gave him his name, what she knew of oak trees, and deciding that she, too, is one of us, those who touch rocks and twigs and shells with reverence. And, most importantly for these days of deepening darkness, I have been rejoicing in the simple, yet unimaginably intricate way in which the seasons – over and over and over – come and go and come again.

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