Moving by Being Still

A flutter of monarch butterflies, hundreds of them, swirled like autumn leaves in reverse, rising up instead of falling down, until landing, wings flexing languidly. There should be music to match the rhythm, like an orchestra conductor’s baton, of butterfly wings. It is the number of butterflies that is thrilling. They cover the branches wing tip to wing tip. With wings closed, they are surprisingly easy to miss, camouflaged as leaves in the poor light of dawn or dusk. But then, they open their wings like synchronized swimmers, a silent metronome beat.

With camera in hand, I strolled the shelter belt of trees, a mess of scrub saplings, wild raspberries bushes, elderberries, and stray rusted barbed wire that once marked the edge of the property. Boxelder trees dominate the shelter belt, most old enough to have oak-like gnarled branches that draped over the yard, brushing the ground. To navigate the riding mower took some practice, lifting the branches with one hand while steering the mower with the other, without being knocked off. But it is those low hanging branches that the monarchs gather, providing a face-to-face encounter watching the monarchs clinging to the leaves, wings opening and closing like a collective heartbeat, just inches from my smile. No expensive camera with a telescopic lens necessary. My little Canon works just fine. I felt obligated to record the monarchs but after several videos and still shots, I put my camera away, to just watch and remember, memory being multi-dimensional, where a photo is not.

The monarchs are preparing for their journey from Minnesota south to the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Like a clueless, inconsiderate tourist at a historic site, I grasp the leaves of the lower hanging branch and pull. The monarchs hung on but then, suddenly, let go in a whirlpool of fluttering orange and black confetti. They rise up, move down the tree line, and settle on another higher branch, and I regret forcing them to expend energy they needed for the trip ahead.

In Minnesota we rush into summer with overbooked expectations and plans, not wanting to waste a single minute of this barefoot season. Impossible summer expectations turn to disappointment in autumn, a melancholy time regretting plans unrealized and goals unaccomplished. What doesn’t die, departs ahead of the snow. Once again, I was considering moving on, a frequent migrator myself but with no destination and little reason except the familiar feeling that I had overstayed my welcome.

I found the realty ad first: a “fixer upper with endless potential for the do-it-yourselfer” followed by “or a tear down clearing the way to build your dream home.” It was four acres, separated from the original farm, now an island surrounded by vast fields of corn, soybeans, and sugar beets, farmed by people who lived somewhere else and who we only saw waving from their tractors.

My significant other (in middle age, I refuse to call us boyfriend and girlfriend), an engineer who can fix or fix up anything, paid cash for the house, four acres of overgrown grass hip high, a shelter belt of battered trees, thistles, stinging nettles, and dumped tires, old model kitchen stoves and sinks, barbed wire, beer cans, and broken cement foundations, sprinkled with empty shotgun shells and bullet casings, two large steel grain bins, and a scattering of  abandoned outbuildings including a barn with a westward lean.

The house is the original homestead. The core—cellar, kitchen, bedroom, living room—more than a century old, with a hodgepodge of rooms added on as the need arose: an attic, a bathroom, and finally the last additions on two sides, probably fifty years old, cheaply built and ruining the charm of the original.

I loved it from the start and put in my time in making the house livable, tearing out flattened shag carpets, painting every wall, and vacuuming bag after bag of mouse poop. My engineer replaced the furnace and water heater and coaxed the finicky well into operation. I cleared the yard of branches and uncovered gardens optimistically planted by previous occupants. I worked like a hired hand, but felt free, hoping to earn my way in.

Instead, after three years, I moved in, uninvited but, I was told, welcomed. What I knew was I could no longer survive apartment living. Nothing compared to the wide sunrises and sunsets and the wind sighing like ocean waves in the towering cottonwoods. I dubbed my new home, The Cottonwoods, but it was not my home. All my homes have been stops along the way to somewhere else. Before I left for college, my divorced mom, my two younger brothers and I, had moved seven times, all rental properties, until we landed on a corner of my grandparents’ farm, living in a cement block, double garage my grandpa had built to house farm equipment. I’m so used to moving, that I don’t ever really unpack, always leaving but never arriving and still looking for that place to settle down and someone to settle down with.

Spring and fall, flocks of Canada and Snow Geese, Swans, and Mallards, use the Red River to navigate their way south. When they fly over, I stop whatever I am doing, to watch. At night, I stand outside in the dark, listening with closed eyes to the conversations as hundreds hunker down for night in the surrounding fields, the soothing murmuring like the quiet conversation of an audience waiting for the show to begin.

The Cottonwoods becomes the crowded rest stop for two migrators that I can see up close and personal, the monarchs celebrated and other maligned. The other is the boxelder bug. Both travelers are insects, both fly, and both wear striking colors of black and burnt orange. That one is the subject of wonder and adoration and the other the target of disdain is an example of beauty being in the eye of the beholder, bad publicity, and pest control company marketing.

Boxelder bugs are easy to step on and forget. What they lack in individual size, they make up for in sheer numbers. There’s just too many of them. In the fall when temperatures begin to drop, they clump together on sun-warmed exterior walls like lichen on tree bark. When they find an entrance—any crack or crevice does the trick—they move in, the walls crawling with them as they jostle for room like any herd of mammals a million times their size. If they were buffalo they would own the Dakotas, living up to the stories of mass herds that stretched from border to border.

The house was on the market for months, left empty spring, summer, and well into fall. The boxelders took up residence and were not inclined to leave. The abundance of easy entry was stunning due to frayed weather stripping under outside doors, the old chimney, the broken basement windows, and the vent leading to the warm and cozy crawl space. The house was like a wayside rest for animals of all sorts. A panicked squirrel once took a full tour of the upstairs and down before it leaped from the living room window to the open door. A bat entered the bathroom through an uncovered light switch. A frog found its way into the bedroom.

It was a losing battle and we surrendered long ago. We settled on a truce, a partnership of sorts, using live traps with no hope of complete annihilation but instead, reasonable population control with our co-inhabitants, who were there first.

It is hard to find a website that isn’t bent on boxelder bug annihilation for a fee. The National Pesticide Center recommends “washing boxelder bugs from your home exterior with water. Boxelder bugs, especially the young ones, can be drowned.” That seems like a horrible way to die.

Boxelders are harmless. They can bite, but rarely do. They can fly up to two miles, but it seems like an effort they seem to avoid making only short hops from wall to lamp shade. They don’t damage houses and they don’t lay eggs in walls. They do smell, if stepped on, but I haven’t noticed that (I will admit to accidentally stepping on some in the bathroom in the dark and feeling regret when I find their smushed bodies when the lights are on).

One early morning, when filling the coffee maker and I saw a boxelder bug climbing the sides of the stainless-steel sink, carefully like a mountain climber, when it fell, landing on its back, its legs spinning like an overturned car. It reminded me, well, of me, and the time I was cross-country skiing around the property, and I fell backward sitting on the tails of my skis. I rolled over and was in the process of rocking to free my skis from my own weight, looking, I’m sure, much like the boxelder bug.

So, I empathized with this struggling bug, a little bigger than my fingernail, as it tried to flip itself right. I set my coffee cup down, tore off a piece of paper towel, and touched the boxelder which instantly grabbed hold like a drowning man. I placed the scrap with bug attached, on the windowsill.

I probably did twenty boxelder rescues that fall. I also began to pay more attention to these tiny invaders and, I realized, they were paying attention to me. I learned they had an ingenious way of crawling up the side of the bathtub; ascending, free climbing, diagonally, methodically, and, it appeared, thoughtfully step by step.

I can anthropomorphize the heck out of any animal or bird, ever since I can remember. I watched too much Walt Disney. Who doesn’t talk to their dogs as if they were a confidant? But never bugs; bugs were meant to be battled by spray or foot, squashed, and forgotten. But as I watched this boxelder climb it brought to mind the amazing videos of free solo climber, Alex Honnold.

Then there was the boxelder on the bathroom mirror that crawled across my reflection as I was brushing my teeth. It paused as if to watch me, it raised up slightly with its front legs, its antennae waving slowly in curiosity, and turned its head (I had to lean in to see this slight movement). I finished brushing and then, I blew lightly at my fellow observer. It took a step back, antennae waving. At that moment it became as fascinating as the sightings of deer, coyotes, and Bald Eagles in our yard.

The bugs and the butterflies both depend on the boxelders trees, the weeds of the tree world, their seeds feeding the bugs and their branches providing a rest top for the monarchs. When the monarchs gather in the trees for the night, it is called roosting, which always reminds me of my grandma’s feisty bantam chickens that roosted on both sides of the narrow ladder to the hay loft creating a flapping gauntlet that was a thrill to run. A gathering of monarchs is known by several terms: flutter, rabble, and a bivouac, which also means a temporary encampment of soldiers. The most beautiful and fitting term is kaleidoscope, for the ever-changing reflective qualities of their colorful wing scales, like chips of colored glass in the child’s toy.

Monarchs are revered and beloved. Bugs? Not so much. Bugs in a group is often called a swarm, and not in a good way (The Swarm is also a horror movie about blood thirsty grasshoppers). There are several orders in the class of insects, but I grew up calling everything that crawled a bug. I once had a close encounter with a cockroach in a hotel in Australia and gave up sleeping for the entire stay. An underappreciated benefit of the cold Minnesota winters is the reset of bug population growth. Boxelder bugs have found a work around. When the temperature dips, they do what any sensible bug would do, find a warm place to winter. Finding a way in is not a problem in our drafty old house. If a frog can find its way in, so can a boxelder.

Monarchs are the only butterfly that migrates like birds, going south in the winter and returning north in the spring. They make the 3,000-mile trip from as far north as Canada and overwinter in the oyamel fur forests of Mexico. The trees can withstand the weight of millions of monarchs whose wings sound like falling rain.

Boxelder bugs can fly also, up to two miles. Compared to monarchs, their flight is clumsy. Inside the house, the clicking sound comes from boxelders crash landing on lamp shades and windows.

Living in the Red River flyway, I can watch the more celebrated migration of Snow and Canada Geese, their honking cannot not be ignored, just above the tree tops it seems, to land a half mile aways in the spring ponds formed of melting snow in the corn fields, maybe not thousands, but hundreds for sure. My engineer and I will drop everything, grab cameras, and climb in the car to race down the straight county roads to find the first landed flocks just barely a mile away. No need to pull aside on the road, we roll the windows down and take photos and videos.

In the early seventies, my mom, two brothers and I, would stand in our yard, eyes to the sky, as thousands of birds, an undulating river of black specks, chattered across the sky, horizon to horizon. Mom would half-heartedly remind us of the work we still needed to do, but, instead, we would sit in the grass or pull up a chair, mesmerized. The migrations were our poor man’s fireworks.

My mom, who passed away during COVID, recognized the value and the blessing of taking a break to look to the sky. Aware that we might qualify as poor if being on food stamps and not having running water counts, she realized we had the sky, the rolling fields, the woods, and the yard, no matter how unkempt and dandelion choked, where deer wandered through like pets.

If we had only known. I don’t remember the last time I saw an endless river of migrating birds, as spectacular as the wildebeest in Kenya and Tanzania we watched on Sunday wildlife programs. When did the birds, the starlings, the grackles, begin to dwindle? When I went off to college and was too busy to watch the skies? When, after college, I migrated from job to job, from marriage to divorce, from one bad relationship to another, always moving but never unpacking. When I did stop looking up at the sky, or looking forward, and only looked down at my feet, standing still.

In July of 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) placed the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) on its Red List of Threatened Species as Endangered. It is not yet listed on the US Endangered Species list. Without intervention, the monarch could disappear in twenty years, a victim of Climate Change and the loss of habitat: milkweeds that feed the caterpillars and flowers that feed the adults.

Our four acres is surrounded on three sides by crop fields. We are not sure what type of pesticides are used on those fields but the cropduster pilot, a neighbor who lives just two miles down the road, stops by to let us know of plans for early morning dusting and to tell us to keep ourselves and pets inside and to cover the bee hives. We see the milkweed plants shrivel by the end of the day. We understand. A crop farmer cannot have a field invaded by milkweed. Instead, milkweeds have taken advantage of our less-than-picky care of your yard. We called it a natural yard because we both work full time and only give the yard the minimum of care, mowing as often as our busy schedules allow. There are pits where trees were downed, ground squirrel and gopher holes, healing scars of tractor and truck tires, thinly dirt covered foundations of long lost out buildings, and a mixture of weeds, dandelions, thistles, with scattered patches of bright green seeded grass. We feel for our neighbor across the road with his obsessively mowed lawn, when the wind lifts our dandelion seeds into the air like fat snowflakes, drifting in his direction.

And now we purposely mow around the milkweeds, and they are flourishing, hardy and nonparticular about where it puts its roots, farm, or field, so we transplant those on the field borders, to the center of the yard to avoid the pesticides.

The monarch’s wings open, hold for a beat, like the palms of a beggar, and then close slowly, deliberately, in no way a flap, but a prayer. Those wings more delicate than a rose petal, will carry the monarch thousands of miles. They ride the thermals and take advantage of the tailwinds. But explaining the aerodynamic principles of butterfly flight account for the magic, how this tiny, wisp of a creature with no armor, teeth, or claws survive this trip. They do not migrate in flocks, like birds, they fly alone without the efficiency of the V formation of geese. They find their way to a place they have never been before. The flight from Mexico to the north is multigenerational, monarchs live two to six weeks except for the last generation in the fall. This generation can live up to nine months, but they have to find their way without previous experience as their ancestors are all dead. There are plenty of scientific theories about how they do this, but none can adequately prove this amazing feat.

The rising sun lights the east-facing branches warming the monarchs. If I don’t get outside early enough, only a few remain, sluggishly opening wings or still conserving heat with closed wings and close clusters. Are they hesitant to leave? The journey is long. They are going to a place they have never been. How they end up in the same mountains as their ancestors is still a mystery. Neither do they flock together to make the trip; they are solitary travelers.

The plans for renovating the old farmhouse never went beyond planning. We are good at planning, my engineer and I, but have lost the heart to do more than that. The unspoken truth was the house would never be a home for us, it was only a stop along the way, a bivouac, and like a good soldier, I will pull up stakes and fold the tent on yet another failed relationship. Without the strength of numbers, I will travel like a monarch, alone, putting faith in my inner compass.

We are all migrators, travelers navigating our lives, sometimes as a group, sometimes alone, but always going somewhere. The earth spins forcing all living creatures to keep moving, searching for the ever-shifting place called home. Like the monarchs, we sometimes continue the trips our ancestors started across borders and oceans, still searching for what is worth leaving everything behind with no promises of what’s ahead.

The boxelders have successfully moved in, ignoring boundaries, but harmless, doing no damage, just looking for a warm place, and I still rescue them out of habit, and occasionally have one-sided conversations with one on the bathroom mirror. They will move out again in the spring. I can’t say I will miss them, but I do have a new respect for them and can appreciate their struggle.

The monarchs left suddenly. Their numbers dwindling until the morning I couldn’t find a single one. They can travel a hundred miles a day, and I imagined where that hundred miles would bring them to roost each night. I will worry about them and miss the encounter that gave me so much more than it gave them.

Animals move for survival. Humans move for opportunity, for careers, for family, for adventure, for safety, for new beginnings, for children born and to be born, for ancestors, for those we will love, and those left behind. We move to get ahead, for dreams, for plans, to forget the past, to forgive, and to heal. We will walk, run, swim, and crawl to find home. We all start the trip that is life step by step, by miles, by kilometers, across borders, across oceans. Some give up, some don’t survive, and some never leave. Some will travel miles and years and end up in a different land but in the same place. There are those that can stand still and yet cross the gulfs that separate us from each other.

I will stay for spring, to plant more milkweed and flowers. I will also fill some gaps in the foundation of the house knowing there will always be more gaps to fill. But, maybe, moving forward can mean staying put for once, if only to wait for the monarchs’ return.