A garter snake sheds its skin by rubbing the itchy, rough patches of its nose against a rock and then when the skin cracked open, it pushes its whole body through,wiggling its way down to the tip of its tail until it was free. This much I knew.

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What I didn’t know, however, was where the snake that left its skin behind was hiding at that moment. I looked around, but there was nothing except the subtle movements and soft murmurs of a small town Pennsylvania neighborhood.

I imagined that somewhere a snake slithered away through the grass, seemingly happy to be away from an itchy past. It was the same feeling, I was sure, that I had when I peeled off my Sunday School tights, the dreaded clothing left curled and limp on my bedroom floor as I slipped into play clothes that left my body free.

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***

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Nature, I was finding out, had its own way of shedding the past and easing its way out of shells or casings that were too binding. The year before, I had spent a week away at a summer church camp where the grounds had been invaded by cicadas. “Locusts,” I had heard one of the teenage camp counselors explain to another although the two terms, locusts and cicadas, do not describe the same insect. The other camp counselor, all red polished nails and makeup, gingerly stepped her way through the forest floor, each step crackling beneath her feet. “Yeah, but why did they have to come on my shift?”

My counselors may not have been impressed with our shell-ridden environment, but I was in awe. I loved listening to the resounding crunch of cicada shells beneath my own sneakers as I ran across the camp grounds. Exoskeletons, I would learn later in a ninth grade biology class, was the proper name for the casings cicadas left behind, but in those days, I wasn’t concerned about proper names. I just knew these leftover shells marked a transitional period from baby cicadas who emerged from the ground to peel themselves away from their past. In a single thrust, it seemed, they pushed themselves out into their adult world, where their bodies hardened and their wings inflated. I just loved the perfectly presented shells that were left behind, shells that clung to the mess hall’s porch railings or the fence that surrounded the swimming pool – random places, really – anyplace, it seemed, where a single insect felt the urge to push its way out of its body.

The morning before I left camp to go home, I plucked shells from a few of the tree branches to take with me. Sliding them into my duffle bag, I knew they would be great treasures for my bedroom. Unfortunately, I did not have my mother’s deft skills in packing, so when I got home, what was once perfectly placed translucent wings and bubbled eyeballs were dusty particles and crumbs, not so different than the fried moth bodies and wings my mother cleaned out of the porch lights with her broom.

I was disappointed in the remnants – pieces that made their way into the kitchen garbage can when my mother shook out my duffle bag before throwing it into the washer. I looked for more shells in the familiar territory of my own world, but finding nothing, as the natural elements probably crushed the shells in the same way as the contents of my duffle bag that included a hairbrush, bottles of shampoo, and wadded bundles of dirty clothes.

I had become enthralled with what could be left behind, scraps of growth, so different than other traces of past natural lives that had always been around me in the form of dead baby birds that fell from their nests or the skulls of voles and mice that were sometimes tilled up towards the sun when my father prepared his backyard garden for planting in the spring. These, I knew, were remains of the dead.

But the snakeskin and the cicada shells were evidence of rebirth, evidence that at least part of the world around me could slip from their shells whole and move forward in another, freer form.

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***

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That year, I started out as simply being obsessed with my skin.

I was ten years old, flat chested with sharp pelvic bones and rough knots for knees and elbows. I was years away from becoming a real girl, it seemed. I knew that changes would come, but at this point in my life, I was comfortable in my body – except for my skin. With a redhead’s complexion, I rarely tanned in the summer sun. Instead, I freckled and burned and peeled. Before I slipped out the door every day to play with the neighborhood boys, my mother smothered sunscreen on me, but it rarely worked. She also tried to smear white vinegar on my burns, claiming that the vinegar would heal my
skin, but that homemade balm also didn’t work. Layers of skin continued to peel from my nose and cheeks. Peeled may be the wrong word – I was sure that I looked like a chipped Plaster of Paris lawn ornament that decorated so many of the neighborhood lawns. I couldn’t help but admire snakes and cicadas for how seemingly effortlessly they shed their skin and transformed into something new. Underneath my flaking skin, I could see nothing new about myself.

Soon, however, I would become obsessed with a different type of transformation.
 

In our local Girl Scout program, we were learning about Monarchs, and I was fascinated with the stories behind the familiar orange and black-banded butterfly. We learned that the yellow, white, and black striped caterpillar, or baby Monarchs, feasted on Milkweed, plants I mostly associated with bulging pods that split open so that fluffy seeds could escape to float through the air. We learned that grown Monarchs migrated south for the winter, often flying all the way to Mexico to hang out in caves. And we learned that their wings were bitter tasting – so much so that predators avoided the Monarch because a meal on this butterfly literally left a bad taste in their mouths.

I was most fascinated by the metamorphosis of the Monarch. The Monarch caterpillar attached itself to some kind of horizontal object and hung upside down to turn into a beautiful greenish-blue cocoon dotted with tiny gold spots. However, we soon found out the correct name of the pretty casing was not a cocoon but a chrysalis. “The bundle would hold the caterpillar so that it could transform,” one of our leaders told us. We were promised that what would emerge would be a beautiful butterfly.

The butterfly was clearly different from other changes I had witnessed in nature. Everything about its change seemed beautiful and graceful. The caterpillar was plump and colorful, the chrysalis was the same color as crystal blue waters, and the butterfly –well, the butterfly that would emerge would be the best part. Its transformation, complete with pretty orange-and-black patterned wings, would take it wherever it wanted to go.

We were holding a troop meeting when the first butterfly emerged. The chrysalis had gradually turned translucent, so that we could see the butterfly inside. Clad in our Brownie uniforms, we gathered around the glass cage and watched as the Monarch slowly split from its chrysalis, its legs tearing the seams and pulling itself out, the actions reminding me of how we climbed the jungle gym at the local playground, one hand on each bar above us, helping hoist our own bodies to the top.

When the butterfly finally emerged, it hung upside down, waiting for its crumpled wet wings to dry. Soon, its wings spread into the familiar orange and black banded butterfly we all knew so well, leaving a thin white caul of its chrysalis behind.

​

As a project, we were each given our own caterpillar that we could take home. I was excited about this new pet, even though at the end, I knew that I would have to release the butterfly so that it could make its way south, far away from the cold winters that northern Pennsylvania always promised.

I lined the top of an old aquarium with a thick screen and placed fresh milkweed pods in the tank. Within a few days, the caterpillar had fastened itself to the top of the tank, completing its slow, twirling dance into a chrysalis. I then waited, hopeful for my own butterfly that I could set free.

But then something went wrong.
 

The chrysalis transformed from a pretty emerald color to a dark pine green. Then, it started to shrink, turning an ugly brown, the same shade of dried and cracked mud.

I knew it was no longer a healthy chrysalis.
 

I also knew that my butterfly was dead.
 

Still, there was a part of me that wanted to be sure. I gently pried the chrysalis from the aquarium and split open the dry shell with my fingers. Inside, I found the remnants of part of an insect’s shredded body, a few tangled legs, and bits of wings.

Then I realized that the remnants of transformations I had witnessed in the wild, the snakeskin and the cicada shells, were probably not as easy as I thought they had been, and that the struggle for these creatures had been very real. I had never actually seen the transformation happen, had never witnessed a snake wiggling from its skin or a cicada emerging from its shell. I had only seen the remnants.

Anything, I realized, could go wrong at any moment, and what I had deemed as magical natural acts, could also turn deadly. Beauty and freedom were never promised.

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***

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A few days before the demise of my butterfly, I had overheard my mother talking to her best friend about her own daughter. The daughter, Ginny, was a few year older than I was and we were friends, in spite of our age differences and her impatience with my so-called immaturity. Apparently, at least according to the tone of their conversation, there were problems at home.

“Growing pains,” said my mother in some kind of tired effort to console her friend. “I went through this with all my girls.” She paused, playing with her teabag in her mug.

I listened quietly as any conversation regarding my three older sisters would eventually turn to me. After all, as the youngest of eight, I found that everything from clothes to toys trickled down to me and that rules of the household were always influenced by what my siblings did, or did not do.

I was right. My mother immediately brought up my name. “I’m sure not looking forward to going through this all with Karen.” There was a strange lull in the conversation where all I could hear was the clink of a spoon as Ginny’s mother stirred her tea.

I was unsure about what she met by growing pains. I knew that I had grown by the faded marks on the kitchen doorway, where my mother measured all of us by lining us up and making marks above the top our heads on the wall. As the youngest that still had a lot of growing to do, my lines were the freshest.
 

But was growing up actually supposed to hurt? In fact, the last time I had seen Ginny, she didn’t really look like she had been in any pain, and she had proudly showed me her first bra, complete with a pink flower in the middle of two soft cups. A training bra, she had confided to me, and I had been a little confused. I hadn’t realized that growing up had required any special training or equipment. My sisters didn’t seem to have any real trouble turning into teenagers except for squabbles with my mother about curfews and boys and what my mother deemed as appropriate clothing.

Thinking about my mother’s words, I stared at the cat scratches across my one arm. Then I rubbed my scraped knee and the scab on my right elbow, injuries sustained when I had fallen off my bicycle a few days before. I know these wounds would scab over, the rough crusty patch would peel off, revealing a healed patch of skin underneath. Outside of having no identifiable marks of a life before, like the outlines of scales or clear bubbles of eyes, the scab did resemble what I had seen discarded in the natural world. While the initial injuries had been painful, the healing, outside of being a little itchy, had not hurt at all.

I ran my hand across my chest, a ragged chewed fingernail catching the material of my T-shirt. I wondered if my own transformation would be like the healthy butterfly, my clothes acting like their own chrysalis, hiding my body until I was ready to break free. After all, it seemed like the women around me had completed their own changes in their own private worlds, wound tight like a cocoon. Even my mother, who struggled with her weight, seemed comfortable, as if her own transformations, many years before, had gone off without a hitch.

Then, I went back to my bedroom where I looked at the husk of a small creature I had carefully placed back into the aquarium. I wondered if something could go wrong with my body. And if it did, how would I know? Who would I ask? Would my mother understand? Or my sisters? Or maybe Ginny?

​

There was nothing suspicious about my own body. I was comfortable. There were no suspicious bumps or growing pain aches. Everything from my sharp angled elbows and knees to my freckled nose was familiar. Nothing had changed. Yet.

Still, I knew that someday I would somehow just wiggle free from my own bindings like a snake or even a young cicada.