A Bridge Between Seasons

The Red Admiral does not wait inside a sealed chrysalis for spring to find her.

Instead, she folds her bright wings beneath bark, inside ivy, in the quiet corners of sheds and hollow trees;

becoming still, not gone.

When winter loosens its cold hand for a single sunny day, she wakes, testing the air, drinking sweetness where she can find it, before returning to silence.

Months pass.

Then one morning, light lingers, the earth warms, and the butterfly opens her weathered wings to the sun.

Not new, but enduring.

Frayed by frost, faded by time, she carries the memory of winter into spring, finding nettles, laying the first eggs of the year, her brief flight becoming another beginning.

By summer the winter is only a softness at the edge of her wings.

She moves from nettle to nettle, leaving single green pearls beneath the leaves, small promises no larger than a pinhead.

She drinks sunlight through her wings, sips nectar from thistles, brambles, and buddleia,

rests only long enough for warmth to gather in her body.

The eggs become caterpillars.

The caterpillars become hidden chrysalides.

Soon, new red admirals unfold their untouched wings into the same bright air.

She has become the bridge between seasons;

the one who carried winter through to spring, and spring into summer.

Before autumn calls, she grows quieter, her colours soften; her wings carrying the map of every flight.

Then, as another generation rises into the light, she slips towards the edges of the year,

leaving the sky to butterflies that have never known the cold.