Friday, August 2, 2013

The Miner's Wife and the Butterflies

There was this once when, set apart in the brush of a Rock Creek campsite, I overheard a woman from Butte as she stepped out of her modest trailer and found the place thronged by a pullulating mass of monarch butterflies, en route to Lower Canada. A miner’s wife, she was suddenly and exultantly astounded by the sight and cried aloud, singing to her husband coming after, “Oh, Vinnie! will you look at all the {effing} butterflies! (her joy declared in seemly brackets). An otherwise sedate wife was beside herself, profanely enraptured by the enormous palpitating cloud rising and softly falling, heaving and gently bucking on that vivid riverine coast. In her downright, downhome, gross delight she exclaimed to her husband and to the landscape, her obscene ecstasy bursting at the bright abrupt beauty of the world.
            
Moral: Who you are depends on this: were you struck more by Decline and Fall or, after all and still in all, a woman’s bliss?

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