thank you, North Hills

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A special thank you to the North Hills Garden Club and to Roy Wilcox, the program chair, for inviting me to speak about monarch butterflies and in particular their metamorphosis which can be only described as a miracle.

And thank you to Elayne Pope for hosting the meeting in her eclectically decorated home. As you can see from the above photo, we had a houseful.

It takes roughly one month from egg to the final emergence of the adult butterfly from its chrysalis. A miracle of nature in just four weeks. 

And as Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. I would be the latter. 

”I write about the short-lived miracles in my third UT Press book, Ephemeral by Nature. 

By the end of the talk, I was pronounced eclectic enough to be an official North Hills-ian and they were going to look for a house for me to buy. But I have never lived on that side of the river and would miss driving across the Alcoa Highway Bridge. 


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