Animal Omens, Apocalyptic Metaphors, The Meaning of Notre Dame, And Looking For God’s House

This spring came the plague of butterflies. For two weeks in March, millions of painted lady butterflies flew through Southern California. Painted ladies visit Los Angeles every year on their migration from the Mojave and Colorado deserts to the Pacific Northwest, but rarely in such astounding numbers. This year their population was boosted by the equally apocalyptic superbloom, as record-breaking winter rains carpeted the deserts at the edges of the city with flowers. Here in the center the streets were choked with butterflies, parking lots and freeways massed with insects blinking orange and black like signal beacons.

The butterflies put me in mind of the cicadas that would erupt onto the streets of Shanghai in the summer, but where the cicadas came to the city to die, obscenely and extravagantly, our butterflies were very much alive. I never saw one die. Every time I drove my car through a cloud of butterflies, braced for a splattering on my windshield, every one would surf away on an eddy of breeze instead. It was easy to compare them to spirits, they were so lightly here, but walking in a strip mall parking lot through tumbling clouds of butterflies that surrounded but never touched me, I had the notion the butterflies were flying through me, that they were solid and I was the ghost.

There were butterflies everywhere, from Pasadena to the 405, but I loved them best beside the brutal, apocalyptic beauty of the Valley, itself so…