Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell
“I want to fly,” my four-year-old granddaughter, Marie, says. “Me too,” I say. We’re watching a My Little Pony video. Some of the ponies fly. Her favorite is Rainbow Dash, a blue Pegasus with a rainbow-colored mane and tail. The pony’s wings are small, but Rainbow Dash can fly fast. Marie loves fast.
She also loves other real or imagined creatures with wings: birds, butterflies, and fairies. Marie is mesmerized by red-breasted robins or blue-bodied stellar’s jays as they flutter from tree to tree in my forest home. I watch as Marie runs beneath them clapping her hands, saying, “fly, fly.” Marie is also fascinated by the butterflies that hover over our lilac and rosemary bushes. She has a little green butterfly net, and occasionally she will capture one. Because of her autism, she’s speech delayed, but she makes happy sounds in her own language. She gently brushes her finger across one of the wings. I notice how the light catches the wings, creating a sparkling shimmer. After inspecting the butterfly, we find a place to re-home it in the large half-barrel filled with lavender, lemon balm, and thyme.
Later, on a trip to Mount Shasta, I find a little store that sells children’s red monarch butterfly wings made of a soft, light fabric. The winged cape has straps around the shoulders and loops around the wrists, allowing Marie to open and close the wings, her movements mimicking a butterfly. Back at my home, she dashes through the yard flapping her arms. “I’m flying, I’m flying,” she says. For a while, those wings are her favorite accessory. She wears her bright red cape everywhere we go.
Less than a year after I buy the wings, they are destroyed in the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire, along with her other cherished toys. In the years that follow the fire, Marie brings three grocery bags filled with her new special toys anytime she leaves home. She fears losing the things she loves, the purple dragon she had saved from the fire, her new little ponies, her fox, and kitten plushies.
Marie just turned twelve. She now has a good vocabulary with her own unique communication style, but talking about emotions is difficult. We don’t talk about the fire or the loss of her former home. But I know she’s had some healing. She no longer needs to bring three bags of toys when she visits, but the purple dragon always travels with her. And she still has the butterfly net.
On her latest visit, she captures a tiny, lustrous green frog. Marie tenderly holds it in her hand, while we walk it over to the half-barrel of herbs where she sets it free. Afterwards, she runs off with her net searching for butterflies through the soft spring grasses and up in the branches of the flowering apple trees. As I watch her run, I think about the traumas she’s faced at such a young age—the fire, numerous moves, COVID, and missed school years. The losses have been difficult, but like the butterflies, Marie soars. “Fly, Fly,” I say.
Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer who lives in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Meadow, The Raven’s Perch, and many other literary journals and print anthologies. Learn more about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.
