Common Mormon

The butterfly that found us this morning was a Romulus—one of the female forms of the Common Mormon. She carried on her wings the delicate deception her lineage has perfected over millennia, a Batesian mimic of the inedible Crimson Rose. In the wild, survival often depends on the art of resemblance, and she wore that inheritance with a kind of understated grace.

Romulus Common Mormon

She moved lightly through the tagar, those simple pinwheel flowers that have stood in our childhood memories like small white lanterns. To watch her now, in this place our children have come to know in their own early visits to India, was to feel something long dormant lift its head. The past is never a distant country; sometimes it arrives on trembling wings.

As she drifted from one bloom to the next, the sun sifted through the thin branches above her. In those brief moments of angled light, her wings—dark, then suddenly flushed with impossible color—seemed almost to breathe. It was a reminder, quiet but insistent, of how the smallest creatures can draw us back into the deeper story of a place, and of ourselves.