Milkweed Junkies

How my life became a Lou Reed song

I thought today, while I wait to see if Southern California is going to be destroyed by a tropical storm, it might be a good day to explain my tension filled misadventures with Monarch butterflies. Last year, after I raised eight of them, I vowed that I would never do it again. Too stressful. Yet here I am right in the middle of doing it again.

It started a few years ago, when we found two monarch butterfly caterpillars on a milkweed plant we had growing in a pot. But the next day, when I went to check on how those gorgeous, yellow and black striped kids were doing, they were gone. Disappeared. Never to be seen again. They were presumably eaten by a regular customer at nature’s big cafeteria. As everyone knows, nature has a sadistic streak and seems to love the idea that all of it’s children, especially the vulnerable, are born with a permanent place on a carefully curated menu designed for someone else.

Cut to: the following year, when we again spotted a couple of these caterpillars on a potted milkweed plant. But this time, I took it upon myself to make sure that they did not have a childhood that was interrupted by being re-located inside someone else’s gastro-intestinal tract.

So, after reading dozens of posts on-line showing how it was done, I bought an inexpensive, collapsible butterfly cage. Easy peasy! Then I simply moved my potted milkweed plant into the cage and zipped it up. Now I could watch the caterpillars as they grew because there was a transparent side of the cage. And there was also a zippered side to allow for the re-supplying of food. However, this probably would not be necessary. The milkweed that I’d already put into the cage consisted of a couple of very large leafy plants.

It looked to me like we were all set for the season. After all there were only four of them: Xander, Aspen, Kayden and Yehuda . That was before I noticed that there were also four smaller ones, apparently newly hatched. But I thought…FANTASTIC! There was plenty of room! And after all, we were only talking about two weeks tops since that is the entire lifespan of the monarch caterpillar. I still had a couple pots of healthy milkweed plants to use for backup. After all, how much milkweed could they require?

So things were going well. Before I knew it, the kids were in middle school. Cute, but you know the pre-teens: all selfish preening and petulant attitude and cell phones.

I admit that it’s not that easy to bond with caterpillars, but against my better judgment, I began to do it anyway. It was easier once I realized they were beginning to exhibit some talent.

Here is Kayden, working on the routine he planned to use to audition for Cirque du Soleil.

He and his sister, Aspen began working together on an elaborate acrobatic routine that I personally found very impressive. Not sure if the barking was Aspen and Kayden, kidding around.

I was of the opinion that they were really good! They needed a few more rehearsals before they headed to Vegas, but….that was also when I realized that my milkweed supply was getting dangerously low. The nine pre-teens in my caterpillar family had chewed through all the plants I had on hand.

I was shocked to see that all of the healthy milkweed plants that had been growing in pots in my yard for years had already become decimated.

These kids had some hearty appetites. And whew… they ate FAST.

Next thing I knew, the beautiful little caterpillar wonderland I had created for my caterpillar family in the cage had turned into a dystopian Cormac McCarthy landscape.

Now I had to get more milkweed,IMMEDIATELY. It is the ONE AND ONLY thing that Monarch caterpillars eat.So I phoned ALL of the nurseries in Southern California. NO ONE was selling it. Then I spread out into other area codes and zip codes. When all I heard was ‘No’, I started getting tense. I tried ordering some ridiculously over-priced plants on-line but who knew when they would arrive or if they would arrive alive. All I knew was that if I didn’t get more milkweed plants, the caterpillars would die. Which is how, after a life of sobriety, I found myself living the dark, panicky life of an addict whose dealer had gone missing. Now what? All I could think of was to ask the ghost of Lou Reed for advice since his songs were playing on repeat in my head. (“Up to Lexington 125, Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive. I’m waiting for my man .”)

Next came a period of laying awake all night long, making mathematical calculations about how much milkweed I needed to score to get 8 Monarch caterpillars thru to adulthood. It seemed unsolvable. I felt so desperate that the next morning I actually went out to a shopping center where I saw a milkweed plant growing in the ground and stole a couple stalks, then hid them in my pocket. That’s what happens when you’re an addict: One minute a law abiding citizen. The next minute you fall into a life of crime. Now I was Jean Valjean. I only did it to save my family.

When I got home from my morning of criming, eager to feed the kids, I noticed with real surprise that a few of the kids were missing. Where could they have gone? Were they out looking for their own dealers? No. Up on the ceiling was the answer. To my bewilderment, they were apparently responding to the commands of mysterious voices that only they could hear . They were being instructed to stop eating and gravitate up, up, up to the ceiling. It immediately reminded me of the Heaven’s Gate cult members who were instructed to put on their Nikes, drink poison and get into their bunk beds so they would be ready to meet a coming transport that would take them to the flying saucer that was waiting for them in back of the Hale-Bopp comet. Somehow, my caterpillar kids all got the bulletin that it was ceiling time.

And so I was SAVED from a life of crime by a bunch of green peppers! But to make sure you appreciate how weird this all is, what if you had a child who had recently gotten a bit taller. And then one day, that child said to you “Mom, Dad…I must go up to the ceiling.” To which you of course respond “Wait…WHAT? NO! Under no circumstances are you doing that.” But they paid no attention. And just as you were figuring out how to get them down from there without hurting them, your child turned into a potato.

It’s the dark, peculiar Fairy Tale that the Grimm brothers forgot to write.

And then, one day, you wake up and look up at the ceiling, intending to say good morning to your children/potatoes, and you see that the potatoes have exploded and two adult humans, dressed and ready to go to work, have emerged. The boy is a financial planner. He is wearing a pair of dress slacks, light colored shirt and a tie. The girl is a dentist, so she is wearing white scrubs. (Apparently they have college courses in that potato) Then they both come down from the ceiling and head off to work. You never see either of them again.

That is the caterpillar story : Inside the Christmas ornament/green peppers is a liquified caterpillar re-organizing it’s DNA into a Monarch butterfly. It happens very quickly. You casually check in as you walk past, to see how the J’s are doing…and in the time it takes to have a shower…the J has been replaced by a green pepper. I’ve never seen one of them make the transition. The closest I came was seeing one shedding the last of his caterpillar costume. In the clip below, you can see him remove it and throw it onto the floor…

Because that is a teenager, no matter the phylum or species. Fine, Zion (I believe it’s Zion in the video. )…Your father and I went to all that trouble to get you that beautifully tailored, yellow and black striped suit which, by the way, fit you like a glove You looked like a million dollars in it. And how do you show your appreciation? By throwing it into a ball on the floor and leaving it there. Teenagers. They all behave like hooligans.

What the caterpillar suit looked like when it hit the floor.

Anyway…those green peppers were the most nerve-wracking iteration of the caterpillar. Were they even alive? How could I tell? People in the on-line caterpillar community warn you that you don’t always get a good result with a butterfly birth. But about 10 days later, when I walked over to the cage to see if anything was going on, here is what I saw:

End part one. Yep. A TWO PARTER! Because it just so happens that I have a dining room table full of the cousins of these guys right now!

.