Chris was my first love. I was 6. Our relationship was innocent, hauntingly delicate and charming in its own way. His mother married my father. I was a visitor on the weekends and he was a full time resident. He was my first kiss, In the basement under the watchful eyes of three curious older siblings cheering us on. I loved going to visit my dad after that just to see Chris, our affair wore off quickly as we became playmates and siblings and discovered we were too young to get married.
I liked board games. He liked red rover. I liked drawing. He liked video games, I liked rummy 500. He liked spit. I liked dollhouses, he joined the drama club. It would never have worked out. He liked everything fast and I was a slow thinker. I entered his world every other weekend; he rarely saw me in mine. We fought and disagreed at times like siblings we were jealous of each other sometimes and then eventually we grew up. But he was precious to me. He was safe. He was consistent and we lived at eye level, in a world full of grown ups and grown up things and older siblings. We were the same for a little while.
When we were about eleven years old, we went south on a family trip. Dad towed the pop-up camper, to Disney or Hershey park I can’t remember. I do remember the pool at the campground, which for two eleven year olds was the most important part of the trip. But water kept getting up my nose and I was sensitive to it. I couldn’t swim, but I could keep myself from drowning. Chris would swim circles around me for 20 minutes while I adjusted to the water temperature. As if I wasn’t awkward enough, My Dad bought me a plastic nose clip with rubber bands that wrapped around my head to hold it in place, and then made me smile for a photo with Chris. We are the same height, holding our towels and wearing flip flops and bathing suits. My bangs are short and uneven, cut no doubt when I was stressed or bored, his hair was long and over due for a hair cut.
Chris was good at making friends instantly. I even today don’t really like people that much, he became a business man, I a writer. My father always admired Chris’s ability to make friends or join a crowd of kids he didn’t know, simply because he wanted something to do. “he’s like a kid magnet, he doesn’t care if he knows them or not .” My dad would then imitate Chris, “hey guys can I join in” modeling for me how to make friends and have fun. It never worked. It wasn’t my way. Fun for me was collecting things.
The innocence of childhood is that we chase our own dreams without apologies, we don’t realize that we look odd, we don’t care. We just pursue things we find interesting. I liked to collect and sort things. Rocks, coins, fleas—really anything that can be categorized. I loved order and patterns and similarities, fractals, science , nature and the world around me. Tall pine trees made me emotional, smooth shells excited me, the idea that a rock could be a rock but have thousands of different shapes colors and sizes thrilled me. So when I had enough of people, I took up searching for butterflies. I made a space for them in my science album after the flea collection. Occasionally I would find one dead, but perfectly intact as if it had a heart attack. I would slide it carefully in place beneath the micro film in my photo album.
One day at the campsite I found a butterfly on the ground. Not just any butterfly, but a large yellow and black swallowtail, strikingly beautiful. It wasn’t fully dead, but it wasn’t fully alive either. It was dying. I wanted it. But I also wanted it to live.
Dad , always supportive of my hobbies and interests, wanted to help me preserve something beautiful before it disappeared, but I didn’t realize the effect it would have on me, I wanted that butterfly as part of my collection in the worst way, it was the best one I had found, but I also was conflicted about the cost of having it.
And that was the tension, I could not explain as a child: I wanted to preserve beauty, possess it, collect it in a jar, keep it from vanishing. But I was also learned that day I was sensitive to suffering. Dad became more enthusiastic, but I remained indecisive, not sure what to do I fled the scene begging my dad to let leave it alone. When I returned, I saw my Dad made his own decision or perhaps the decision I couldn’t make.
I was upset. Instead of helping it survive, we crushed it, suffocating it between the plastic pages of my memory book. It would take me years to understand why that moment unsettled me so deeply. I thought loving something meant keeping it. I loved that butterfly, but That afternoon at the campground was the first time I discovered those weren’t always the same thing.
The butterfly taught me things. It awakened me to death. sadness. And the power I held—all in a single moment. I was no longer a child seeing the world through the lens of my own needs and desires. Childhood had left the room, compassion quietly slipped in.
Chris and I don’t talk much any more, we occupied the same space for a moment in our lives. Then we didn’t.
Life is precious and fragile It is filled with breathtaking beauty, change, and sometimes death. We cannot preserve everything we love , Maybe our task is simply to love what is here while we have it. Otherwise, preservation can become another form of loss.
I still take a lot of photographs when something strikes me. I write prolifically to keep from losing my thoughts and ideas. I paint to preserve some sense of beauty. The impulse to collect things that matter to me, has never actually left me, it has taken different forms. But what the swallowtail taught me all those years ago, something I have spent the rest of my life learning: not everything beautiful can be kept. Some things are only meant to be experienced and released.
My Faith Place 