'One Might Be Eating Butterflies'

Between Sunday and Wednesday I saw four butterflies, each a different species, each flitting in a patch of sunlight without a flower in sight. I first moved to Texas almost fifteen years ago and my sensibility remains steadfastly Northern. Seeing butterflies in March not pinned in a specimen case is still dazzling. Spring didn’t even technically arrive until Wednesday, the same day as the Modern Library edition of V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1972), published in one volume in 1994, showed up in the mailbox. Happy serendipity delivered this passage, from the first memoir, to me:

“But we go to cold beef, for it is wicked to cook anything on Sundays—except Yorkshire pudding. This is sacred. Light as an omelette yet crisp in the outer foliations of what it would be indelicate to call crust, it has no resemblance to any of that heavy, soggy, pasty stuff known all over England and America by the name. Into it is poured a little gravy made of meat, and not from some packaged concoction. One might be eating butterflies, so lightly does it go down; it is my grandmother’s form of poetry.”