Caterpillar

My Aunt Roberta is my mom's twin sister.  She has been amazing to help my parents.  She lives an hour North of them, but still travels down multiple times a week to help with various projects and to sit with my mom on the nights my dad has choir practices and Emily has to work.

She was asked to speak in her stake conference a month or two ago and this is a story that she shared.  My mom also shared this story with the young women in her ward. 

Growing up on the Hash Lane property in Reno, we would be outside looking for polliwogs in the spring soon after they turned the water into the irrigation ditches. It was so fun to see those polliwogs start to grow their little back legs and lose their tail. We would also watch carefully for their little front legs to start growing. It didn't seem to take them very long to change into frogs. What an amazing process!

Then, in the fall, we would start searching the milk weed plants for caterpillars. If we were lucky enough to find one, we would bring it home and put it in a glass canning jar. We would poke holes in the lid and put some milk weed leaves and the caterpillar inside the jar. We fed it more leaves since the caterpillar would eat a lot while it was growing big enough to spin its chrysalis. It was always such a miracle to see the caterpillar growing, spinning its chrysalis, and then becoming a butterfly. I have never have lost my wonder with this process.

As the years have passed, every once in awhile, I would find a caterpillar around Millville. A few times, I was able to find one and take it to school so that the students could enjoy watching this transformation.

A few years ago, I noticed milk weed growing along the canal east of the house. I think that those milk weed plants might be where the milk weed seeds came from that started growing in the garden boxes in the backyard and also in the front yard where the rosebushes used to be. Since I enjoyed watching caterpillars so much, I let the milk weed grow in order to create a good home for caterpillars. It worked.


I am going to give a little background to this story now. Last fall, two members of our stake presidency came over for a visit. Since I had been lucky enough to find some caterpillars last year, I happened to have one in the house when the stake president and one of his councilors came for visit, I was excitedly telling them about the caterpillars I had been able to find. I happened to have one in the house that was already in its chrysalis and so I figured that it was sturdy enough and safe to move the caterpillar and to bring it from the kitchen into the living room to show it to them. The stake president saw the chrysalis and said, "Oh, that caterpillar is trapped right now." I was flabbergasted. I had never thought of the chrysalis restricting the caterpillar in any way at all. So, I replied, "Oh no - that isn't its trap - that is its changing room." The stake president went on to say that the caterpillar's chrysalis was like a jail cell. Again, I told him that it was more of a transformation station, a changing room, or a becoming place. I have thought about this quite a bit as did the stake president. In life, we sometimes think of things as a jail cell when God looks at them as a transformation station or a becoming place. It is an easy lesson for me to apply to tadpoles and caterpillars, but it is not always as easy for me to see in my life. Sometimes when I feel like I am in a "jail cell," God might want me to see it as a "becoming place."

Well, I better watch what I share more carefully in the future because in December, the stake president and this same councilor came for another visit and asked me to speak in stake conference!! I got the feeling that the stake president wanted me to share this story of the caterpillar changing into a butterfly during conference. So, I spoke and I did share this experience.