Pinned

Walking along a country road with my husband Alan and my dog Lana in Gardiner New York one hot summer day in July, I saw a dead butterfly on the side of the road, and I left it there.  I thought maybe it wasn’t really dead, but when I came back, it was still there and quite dead.  I picked it up carefully and took it home.  I put it in a plastic container with a damp paper towel for 24 hours.  Then I was able to manipulate it enough to pin it so I could see its structure.  It was my first time pinning a butterfly myself, and I didn’t do everything right, so I lost some of the scales, but I was careful enough that I could identify it as the Eastern Comma, Polygonia comma from the family Nymphalidae.  I stared at it for a while and realizing how important drawing is to looking and to knowing, I decided to draw it.  It had faded so I needed to check through my butterfly books to get the colors of the tiny butterfly with the 1 ¼” wingspan.  Little did I know then that it would become part of the banner of my blog.