Sometimes the butterfly matches its flower. Or the rest stop accommodates the traveler, opens just the right amount of space, offers tasty cookies with that watery free coffee, anticipates what might seem like nectar in the middle of a journey.
This is us making the most–the best–of a 7-hour layover in Chicago, enjoying the gardens at Millennium Park before meeting friends for drinks and snacks (and then back to the Blue Line, and then back to the airport, and then back to the plane). 
I don’t know what kind of butterfly–moth?–this is. But I thought of my mother, who has been encouraging Monarch butterflies into the winery gardens for years, and somehow managed to coax one or several (and how do they see, or smell, or intuit the milkweed waiting for them beside a pond they have never visited?) to build their chrysalis and lay their eggs (wrong order, I know) on her milkweed leaves and split rail fence. 
But that’s Oregon, and these photos are Chicago. These are city photos–can’t you tell? So how do the butterflies find their way among the skyscrapers to the right flower? Maybe they fly across the lake.
I do think of my mother in Chicago, because she grew up in what is now a suburb but then was mostly woods, the way she tells it. I think of freezing “spring” break expeditions to visit the museums. I think of another layover, seeing the Art Institute between trains on our way out west. It was an exhibit about Alexander the Great, and I can still see an extraordinary gold crown, thin hammered leaves that I remember as oak leaves (I may well be wrong) vibrating faintly in the splendid isolation of a backlit case. 
I framed these photos as if I were in the midst of a flowering prairie, but it was a crowded day at the park. Lots of kids in the fountain, plenty of us dangling our bare feet in the creek–I say creek, but I don’t know what they call it; I didn’t pick up a map. A granite channel with a wooden deck along one side, a tall evergreen hedge for shade, a space that felt almost private, even when shared. Music in the background from a performance rehearsal, and then plenty of folks like me, bending waaay over and nearly off the please-keep-on path, trying to get close enough to the butterfly to touch it, but not touching. We, too, were an area under restoration.
