I’ve started a new novel for younger readers (what the publishers call middle grade) and it opens with a boy studying insects. Soon enough the butterfly will appear.
It’s hard to find an outdoor photo from my childhood where I am not carrying a butterfly net. I’ve not written about this before, because of Nabokov. Might as well start a novel about a middle-aged European man obsessed with nymphets. Still, I was many years away from reading Nabokov when the parents of a neighboring, older boy, instructed my mother on the process of constructing a net from cheesecloth, broomstick, wire hanger and duct tape.
I stopped romping around with a net when I became a teenager, conscious of the aura of effetism such a picture could conjure. Still, my fascination remained and I couldn’t help myself when I captured a zebra butterfly by hand on college spring break to Miami, about the same time I realized that my father’s zoom lens had a macro setting.
Within a few years I had invested in a Tamrom 90mm dedicated macro lens and was soon off chasing butterflies again. But I had completely forgotten this particular expression of that passion, until Google brought it back to my attention.
My story and pictures on the butterflies of New Jersey in New Jersey Outdoors is about halfway through this pdf:
https://dspace.njstatelib.org/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10929/26564/1985%20May_June.pdf?sequence=1
