How to Live

As a child my father would take my older brother and I butterfly hunting.  Like tiny Victorian biologists we would  trek out into our backyard jungles, our vacation plains, our temporary mountains and hunt for a new variety to mount and preserve in our collections.  My brother was a master in collection and identification-his ability to interpret swirls of powdery pigment, to translate wing size and thorax into the words of species and variety were unrivaled among 10 year old lepidopterologists.

In grade school, we collected caterpillars.  With first grade fingers both cautious and destructive, the caterpillars were lowered into glass terrariums to be observed.  Overnight the caterpillars disappeared into their leafy cocoons and then...nothing.  School yard days dragged on in a way that would be recalled a decade later, waiting for college entrance letters to arrive.  The cocoons did not move.  They did not wriggle like worms or crawl like bugs or fly like rose petals on the wind. They were ugly, dry and still.  Then, a twitch, and a crack like falling trees that thundered through the microcosm of the terrarium.  We children did not notice.  We had abandoned the cocoons weeks ago in favor of a donated turtle and a blood feud on the four square court.  The cocoons ripped down their natural seems and the butterflies gnashed and fought their way into existence.

Alarmed, the butterflies flew to the upper most corner of their glass universe and clung to the side, trembling with the fear of the unknown and giddy with possibility of flight.  They looked down at their abandoned cocoons, heaped on the terrarium floor, worthless and in pieces and wondered briefly why they ever needed those silly things.  They looked out and saw the huge fleshy faces of our first grade class, suddenly interested again in their progress.  They reached out their antennae to grasp on to each other in butterfly celebration.

"Tom?"
"Yes, Suzanne?"
"Can we fly?"
"I think so."
"Well, this just got interesting."

tl;dr  We moved all of our things, save the necessities into my parents garage.  With the exception of our cars (anyone want to buy the big, red, Jeep?) we have cast off most of our worldly possessions.  Feels good, man.