As we near the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we all live in a time of decimated butterfly populations—with countless species—such as the Painted Ladies, as well as butterflies in the United States generally—increasingly vulnerable to habitat loss due to development, pesticides, and climate change. For me, increasing climate anxiety has attended other similar kinds of losses of which millennials and zillennials seem to experience no end. And yet all butterflies attract me toward the possible in life. I know these seemingly vulnerable beings may fly for thousands of miles, and even then, may make entire migration journeys not singly but in several generations. Perhaps stewardship is still possible.

In November of 2024, my mother and I made our way from Palo Alto to Santa Cruz to visit a Monarch Butterfly Natural Preserve. My parents, both transplants to Los Angeles, plant native milkweed in their lawnless garden in the San Gabriel Valley foothills where thick caterpillars gather, but I have never seen adult monarchs at an overwintering site. I had originally planned to see them in Monterey that fall, something that has long been on my California bucket list, but my mother and I were both dealing with grief. I do not remember exactly why we suddenly decided to see them at a closer distance in Santa Cruz instead—only that we also wanted to visit the UC campus there, which we had both never seen before, excited to turn our minds to what the so-called “banana slugs” were about.

Nearing the preserve itself, my mother and I gained easy public access to the Natural Bridges State Beach and saw diverse gatherings of people happily picnicking at the benches amidst the scrubby pines, reminiscent of the scene where Justice and Lucky talk by the ocean in Poetic Justice (filmed at Gray Whale Cove State Beach in Half Moon Bay). Before we started towards the hush of the eucalyptus grove, we stopped in at the education center and store to buy postcards, t-shirts, and monarch ephemera as way of donation. But nothing could prepare us for the experience of the grove itself. It was quiet and warm. Soft and magnificent. So many kinds of people gathered peacefully. On a bank of wooden steps underneath the main atrium of the trees, a group of teens lay, heads tilted towards each other, chatting (cell phones momentarily tucked away) while the monarchs floated and nested above.

Later that weekend, I began writing a poem I called “On Not Seeing the Monarchs in Monterey,” Berkeley Poetry Review (forthcoming, no. 54). It ended up being about all the everyday and kind and strange things that happened to my mother and me in the aftermath of the election. People often treated us quite differently those few days. Most of the time it was welcomed. But we experienced respite in the butterfly grove as the focus was not upon us. Indeed, it is the feeling of genuine, perhaps desperate, “hope” amongst the butterflies that I want to chase in my writing—the feeling of both my mother and me tucking away our grief for a moment and saying “yes” to our ongoing dreams of California and beyond, that they may one day be passed on as more than memories.