Flying the Friendly Skies

This image hardly looks like a Painted Lady butterfly.  That's because it isn't.  Not exactly.  It's actually a radar image of our lovely visitors as they flew over Denver earlier this week.

. . . all 70 miles of them!

A typical Painted Lady is 3" wide.  Feather to feather, it would take about 21,000 of them to stretch across a mile.  And in  a 70-mile stretch?  About a million and a half, if they flew one deep.  

A few weeks ago, I was flipping out over the 200 I counted in our garden.  During those lovely layover days,  I couldn't get home from school fast enough--how many would I find today?!  And now I'm asked to imagine hundreds of millions of them, all catching a ride on the same wind! 

Please tell me that some little boy was stretched out on his back in a Denver park, looking up into the sky, tracing doggies out of clouds, only to find a wild, beautiful dragon arching its way across his view.

There are so many incomprehensible things in the world these days.  Things that hurt the head and the heart.  Things that can keep us from looking up.

And then, there is this--millions and millions of half-ounce creatures flying a 4,500-mile journey over mountains, through rains, across oceans and and and . . . .

This is exactly what I needed right now.  Something beautiful and mysterious that I cannot possibly comprehend.