The great milkweed caper of 2024

At a few minutes past midnight one warm July night, a shadowy figure skulked across our backyard. The prowler moved past the swing and the trampoline, then paused—a hand extended—to examine the periphery of our neighbors’ garden.

I froze, considering my options: call the cops, alert my neighbors, or wake my sleeping wife, whom I hoped might lend a little insight on the matter. I went with the latter option, though upon returning to the pile of bedsheets—“Psst, Meredith, wake up,”—I noticed that not only was she not sleeping, but she wasn’t there at all.

I sighed. I thought that shadowy figure looked familiar.

When my prowler-wife finally returned to the house, I said, “I think you have some explaining to do.”

“In my defense,” she said huffily, “I was afraid they were going to eat each other!”

I suppose this statement, too, requires some explaining.

The “they” in question referred to my wife’s terrarium’s worth of caterpillars, which she had been tending for several weeks. Those caterpillars were destined to become butterflies in a matter of days, so long as my wife supplied them with sufficient milkweed.

This was precisely the problem that had led her into the neighbor’s backyard. Meredith had woken in a start, she confessed, fearful that the lack of milkweed in the terrarium might lead her caterpillars to resort to cannibalism, a fate that had befallen her brood the previous summer.

She needed milkweed fast, she explained, and since desperate times call for desperate measures…

“…you saw fit to steal milkweed from our neighbors,” I said, finishing her story for her.

“…in an attempt to prevent acts of cannibalism,” she stressed. “Anyway, it’s not like I actually stole any. Larry started barking so I got out of there.”

“So you called off the heist then?”

“I did.”

“Good,” I said. “Well, except for the impending cannibalism.”

“I’ll give them a couple of scraps from the one tiny milkweed plant in our yard,” she said. “It’s not much, but it should tide them over, at least.”

Under normal circumstances, I like to think of my wife as a person of high moral character. But when caterpillars enter the scene, she devolves into a person of middling moral character.

But since we’d recited marital vows that included the phrase “in good times and bad,” I did not call the police on my wife that night. Instead, I tried a different tact.

“This,” I said kindly, taking her hand, “is an intervention.”

She snort-laughed.

Ask me if I ever thought I’d catch my wife loitering in the dark in the neighbors’ yard, guided by cell phone light, in pursuit of milkweed, and my answer would be an unequivocal maybe. If I know one thing about my wife, it’s that she doesn’t quit on those who need her. If I know two things about her, it’s that she has a strict anti-cannibalism stance, including among very hungry caterpillars).

What would I have done, she asked me, if I’d woken in a start to the very real possibility of one caterpillar making a meal of another? Wasn’t it a matter of life and death? Didn’t she owe it to the caterpillars to try to save them from the same fate that had befallen their comrades the previous summer?

“Besides, what’s a little thievery among neighbors,” she concluded, “when the stakes are so high?”

The stakes, I reminded her, were caterpillars.

But by this point in our conversation, my moral compass was spinning. Because I knew, of course, that the stakes were much higher than just caterpillars. The stakes were butterflies.

Even a curmudgeon like me can admit that there’s something magical about witnessing their metamorphosis from egg to larvae to caterpillar to butterfly.

Their lifelong transformation seems mysterious, each stage seemingly unlikely yet entirely possible as long as humans don’t drop the ball on the milkweed.

In contrast, we humans aren’t half so mysterious. We are, I fear, creatures of dull and dutiful habit. While many of us worry about “what comes next,” I suspect larvae are neither blessed nor cursed by that question. What comes next for them, I suspect, is beyond their pinhead-sized brains. But imagine a caterpillar’s surprise upon emerging from its chrysalis and finding itself utterly new.

Where did those wings come from? the newly “born” butterfly must wonder before taking to the skies.

Meredith’s transformation from “pillar in the community” to “Gardengate “ perpetrator proves that humans can also change. Sometimes, we evolve to become our better selves, other times, to become those with little regard for property lines.

Yet I’m convinced my wife’s midnight caper was a few skulking steps in the right direction. Now more than ever, our world needs folks to look out for the most vulnerable. To care enough to wake at night to halt injustices big and small.

There’s so much darkness in the world that when given the rare opportunity to offer a little light, we have an obligation to try.

I know at least one commandment about “loving thy neighbor” and one prayer about forgiving trespassers (like my wife).

And so, neighbors, with that in mind, we ask for your love and forgiveness.

In exchange, when our butterflies burst forth into the world, we’ll be sure to send a few your way.