Purple Flowers

The cabbage butterflies, savagely copulating their way out of summer, have become something to consider. Watching them meet, paper-white and frantic as they are, in the air above emerald green fields of alfalfa and again above the black heat-warped highways I drive, watching them funnel together and then spiral down, lascivious and windblown in their unyielding embrace, I cannot ignore that change is afoot. All spring and summer they ignored one another, overlooking their opposite sexes. Now, pairing is their exclusive obsession. I cannot avoid them as I whisk along, driving from place to place. Sometimes they fall all around me like flapping snow.

So I consider the butterflies. Have they gone silly with hormones? Does sex blind them to all else? Do they recognize the countdown of days, the incrementally shorter hours of light? Is this desperation only? Do they smell mortality in the final saccharine hay blossoms? Or are the butterflies filled with their air-dancing desire by the sweet scent of purple flowers? Does the trigger even matter?

The butterflies are pretty, even when breeding. We must give them that. I am not sure we can say that about, as example, porcupines or your nearest neighbors. And there is this: only very recently, something has changed in my own perceptions. Not sex. Not sex, precisely. Close, but not that. For many months, most women seemed little more than bright faces floating up around me—inexact in their sex, and with voices that sounded like spoons rattling in glass salad bowls. I gave them no lingering thought. But now I hear something different in their voices, something familiar and sweet as the birthday song, something like purple flowers to a late butterfly.

--Mitchell Hegman