Butterflies endure, prevail

This is a story I have told before. Readers related to me may have already heard it. It made a big impression on me. On May 15th, the first spring we lived here, I looked out our front window and saw a hummingbird looking back at me. I found myself a cup hook, a hammer and a pliers and went outside to try my hand at getting the cup hook into the overhang in front of the window so that I could hang my hummingbird feeder there. My preparations proved unneccessary. A hook was in place already--exactly where I would have put it. I hung my feeder and have faithfully tended it, May to September, for twelve years now. Sometime in the first half of May when the fruit trees, wild and tame, begin to bloom, the little birds come back. If I don't have the feeder ready yet, they come near the window and look in as one did that first year. I figure if they know a feeder is supposed to be there, they must be returnees, which is impressive. So tiny, but they travel more often and farther than I do. [Of course, I stay here all winter and that's impressive too.] In late summer, wasps often start to hang around the feeder. It had three feeding ports, but the hummingbirds don't even feed with each other, let alone with a bunch of wasps. So there is much circling around, hummingbirds charging at wasps and vice versa, each trying to drive the others away. One afternoon I looked up from reading in my chair by the window and saw a newcomer sitting on one of the feeding ports--a large butterfly. Soon the wasps came buzzing around it and then a hummingbird came and feinted back and forth. Through it all the butterfly just sat there seemingly oblivious to all the commotion, slowly opening and closing its wings, patient and brave, and finally the only one left at the feeder.