My young relative looked at me amused and made a gesture with his hands imitating the fluttering of a butterfly. “It’s because we planted a host plant and it filled up with butterflies,” his mother explained to me, her face backlit, a 19th-century beauty, very pale skin, high cheekbones, while breastfeeding another even younger relative lying on a sofa. She said it as if I knew what a host plant is, as if everyone had a host plant in their house, then she clarified that it is a plant on which butterflies usually lay their eggs, that they planted it deliberately in the garden, that one day she saw a butterfly there, that the next day the plant was full of larvae that soon became butterflies too, and that all this had happened there, 10 meters from where we were, in a yard where there is also a canoe and a long wooden table and a grill and plants of all kinds including cacti — which makes me stay away from that place if I go accompanied by human puppies after a certain experience involving my young relative and a piece of cactus; my vigilance does not work well —, and I said to myself: “We live in different worlds. This one is beautiful.” There was my young relative making the fluttering gesture, smiling, blond and blue-eyed, with all the scent of peaceful sleep rising from his peach skin, telling me without speaking that he had witnessed the inconceivable miracle of a fertility-calling plant, with his whole family vibrating around like an amber body in the cold morning, feet inside their slippers with a rabbit or bear face — I didn’t look closely —, toys scattered on the table and floor, plans to go to the park or the carousel or wherever, because all plans are good when you are eight months or four years old and have parents who build memories for the future appealing to the world, memories made of the magic of things.
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