It all started during a very unusual Irish heatwave. The country was boiling at 30 degrees Celsius, and the inhabitants, not used to this kind of heat in their own country, were boiling.
Now, if you had thrown them somewhere in Spain, France or Italy at the same temperature it would have been just grand. In Ireland though, it was a different story. There were talks of drought in the country were it always rains.
As Irish houses do not have air conditioning, because they just don’t need it, the people living inside them had all the windows open day and night, in an attempt to cool themselves even just a little bit.
And this is exactly what Lorna did. One of the few downsides of working from home, as she found out, was the lack of cool air, which in the office was often the object of discord between the different metabolisms present.
The open windows helped, especially in the morning the house was filled with a nice, cool air. And with the night air, Lorna was surprised to see on the walls of her rooms and hallway, butterflies starting to appear.
‘A borboleta.’, Lorna muttered to herself the only Portuguese word she knew, which means butterfly.
Looking at them on the walls Lorna was conflicted, should she kill them? Get the hoover and just make them disappear from the walls? But why kill them? They had done nothing wrong. They had flown into the house through the open windows, unknowing they were flying into a human’s habitat.
Unsure of how to proceed Lorna decided to postpone making a decision. She had learnt from experience that, when you are not sure, it is best to give it a bit more time.
A voice in Lorna’s mind agreed with her and whispered ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’
So, satisfied with her decision she got a cup of tea and went back to work.
When the second day a small butterfly kept pestering her and flying around her head while trying to read, Lorna told it ‘You are looking for it little fellow! Best hide somewhere far from me or you will find it!’
After a few erratic movements of her hands, the little butterfly disappeared. When she met it in the bathroom later, Lorna congratulated it ‘See, good job! You managed the escape me!’
For some reason or another Lorna started to think about angels, especially when a beautiful yellow butterfly that seemed dead on her window sill, came to life when she blew on it in the direction of the open window.
The heatwave passed after two or three weeks, and the windows were closed again.
Lorna’s walls were now white again, only crossed from time to time by the ever present spiders.
Without knowing Lorna found that she missed them, and was often disappointed when she looked at a wall and no butterflies were there. Because they were no longer in her house, she started looking them up on her computer.
She started by looking up the yellow one, that had come back to life under her breath. With ease she found it, Common Brimstone it was called, and with it she found many others, fascinating in looks and behavior.
As time went by, Lorna found that she loved spending time in the garden looking at the butterflies that visited her plants. She would then spend her evenings looking them up online. While doing that she stumbled upon a butterfly spotters group in her area, and without much consideration to her anxiety and misanthropy she joined them on a butterfly spotting expedition.
After doing this for about a year Lorna had become close friends with the butterfly spotters, and they all decided to take a group trip to Tenerife to visit the Mariposario del Drago, where Lorna thought she had seen paradise.
Lorna took loads of photos in Tenerife, and then her group was invited by the library in their small town to show the images to children, and their parents if interested.
Lorna who before barely left her house and only talked to the cashier at her local Dunnes store, was now in front of twenty something children passionately telling them about butterflies.
A few days later, a child passed her on the street and whispered to his mother in the very loud voice, that only children can whisper in. ‘Mommy, look, the butterfly lady!’
The mother gave an embarrassed look apologizing with her eyes.
Lorna smiled wide and shook her head amused.
She had loved being called the Butterfly Lady. She felt like she belonged.
And it all had started with a scorching heatwave in rainy Ireland.