Turn your backs to the cold wind

What is going on is that I am in a spectacularly bad way, physically, even for me, and the doctor to whom I would normally have taken my problems is out of the office for another week yet and I am not having a great deal of success with their covering team; hence I have not been much present lately and spent the whole of last night lying on a couch, re-reading assorted Dick Francis and James Clavell's King Rat (1962) for the first time in decades. On the other hand, my mother has hatched all nine of her monarchs successfully and the next round of caterpillars is already rippling through the milkweed. The youngest of this set must be Random by age and coloration, but also because it remained inside its chrysalis until everyone who had been awaiting its entrance with bated breath was out of the room for a minute and then modestly slipped out and began to dry its wings blamelessly in the sun. I have also been reading Jen Manion's Female Husbands: A Trans History (2021) and it's great. Before this afternoon, I had never heard of the hibakujumoku, the A-bombed trees.

Baby, let your colors burn

I got to release a butterfly into the wild of my parents' yard.