Was I Meant To Witness This?

They start off small and strange, and they look like something to be cleaned up.

I thought maybe she was resting. But when I looked closer, I realized she was doing something much more deliberate: laying eggs. One by one, with care, on the parsley leaves I’d planted more for curiosity than anything else.

I watched her dance first.
A black swallowtail, fluttering low over the parsley in my raised bed. She hovered, dipped, hovered again—circling with intent. And then, gently, she landed.

I kept checking over the next few days—wondering if anything would come of it. I saw tiny yellow dots on the plants no bigger than a pin head.

And then, after about three to five days, they appeared.

Tiny, blackish lumps. Honestly? They looked like bird droppings. I almost wiped one off before remembering what I’d been waiting for. These weren’t signs of mess—they were signs of new life.

Swallowtail caterpillars don’t emerge in beauty. They don’t signal their arrival with bright stripes or cartoonish charm. They start off small and strange, and they look like something to be cleaned up. That’s no accident—it’s a defense mechanism, camouflage designed to keep them safe until they’re big enough to say, “I belong here.” Their bird dropping disguise is no accident.

Now, every morning, I check for them. Some are still tiny, barely the size of a grain of rice. Others are a little bigger, bolder, starting to take shape.

And I keep thinking about how easy it is to miss something just because it doesn’t look like what we expect life or beauty to look like. At least not yet.

Transformation often starts in disguise