Cecropial is not a real word but Cecropia is. It is a BIG moth that this lepidoptera-phobic idiot was once terrified of. (And this is a luna moth, not a Cecropia.)

I’m not sure how I got to the point where I was terrified of big insects with exotic wings. When I was a small child I owned a beautiful butterfly book and I could name any butterfly in that book.

My cousin Mac was three years older than me. I admired him (and his older sisters) greatly. We lived in the same town growing up and next door to each other in the summer on the moominbeach. He owned a butterfly net. I bugged the shit out of him to take me (his 3-year-old GIRL cousin) out with his net to catch butterflies. Okay, he finally did. What did we catch? A monarch butterfly AND a BEE. Your 3-year-old heroine ran screaming back to the moomincabin. Mac was probably flummoxed by his stupid little cousin’s reaction.

To this day, I can’t totally process this stuff. I am not particularly freaked out about stinging insects at all now but I am still freaked out about a few butterfly species. Stinging insects can actually harm you (although they don’t seem to harm me much). Butterflies are harmless to humans.

In second grade, my class incubated and hatched a Cecropia moth in our classroom. I was like, “Oh no, I cannot do this”. Mrs. Bishop was one of the best teachers on earth and, knowing that I might freak out with a huge moth flying around the room, shw quietly shipped me to another classroom or wherever for the duration. She was also the teacher that had to deal with me vomiting all over my desk while our class watched John Glenn orbit the earth. I was legitimately sick that day and probably shouldn’t have been at school spreading what was probably norovirus around.

Cecropia moths do not freak me out any more, nor do luna moths. A couple of butterfly species continue to freak me out. This is not an uncommon phobia, as it turns out. My aunt Charlotte was also afflicted with it. She got herself over it by forcing herself to pick up butterfly wings from her son’s littered bedroom floor. I’m not sure I could’ve done that…

I don’t think I have ever written that cousin Mac died just before COVID hit. It was early March 2020 and we were at our annual Quiet Water Symposium for the weekend and I was happy birthday washing my hands. I was posting pictures of East Lansing where Mac had lived many years earlier. He often “liked” the pictures I took there. For some reason, I noticed that he wasn’t reacting to them that year but didn’t really think about it. On Monday morning, I was working at Cubelandia and his beloved (eldest) sister notified me that he had died. Mac and I had a complicated relationship but I loved him and I miss him now. Losing cousins is hard.

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