Flutterbys

[angharad_gam]

I've always been susceptible to superstitions. I know not why, except to suppose that I am an especially credulous person. One that's stuck with me for a while I picked up from one of the Moomintroll books, that I first read when I was about six or seven. It goes like this: if the first butterfly of summer that you see is white or yellow then that is good luck, and you are in for a lovely summer. If the butterfly is brown or black then that is terrible luck.

I've often wondered at the logic of this, from a gardener's perspective. After all, there's a reason they call them 'Cabbage Whites'. But I was reminded of it recently when I saw my first butterfly of this spring and it was black and orange. So I looked it up (well, I googled it). And while there are a couple of 'see this colour butterfly, expect good weather' superstitions there's nothing I could find that more precisely matched the Moomintroll superstition. Curse you, Tove Jannson, you have misled me for thirty years!

Comments

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

Well that's because you haven't met the ferocious Black Vampiric Butterfly that seeks out flowers and sucks their vital fluids... Actually that's most of them, isn't it?

[angharad-gam.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. When I lived in the UK I had this one particular flowery skirt. If I sat very still out on the lawn, sometimes butterflies would come and land on it, and attempt to eat it. Vampiric, and daft.