In late summer, there are butterflies near the water, beautiful creatures whose fragile looking wings belie their ability to fly thousands of miles when it’s time to migrate. One day in early September, a butterfly flirted with me on the beach at Sunset Bay. I viewed it as a messenger: “Don’t be sad, Maureen!” Maybe it really was angel confetti, or maybe it was just an insect foraging in the washed up seaweed for its lunch.

Either way, it was lovely–shimmering golden orange, velvety black, electric blue, and so graceful and considerate. The next day I took my camera to the shore and waited. Two monarchs showed up. I watched them air dancing for a while, and when one landed on a seaweed pile, I perched in a squat, composed the shot and focused, and waited for it to open its wings. When it did, I took a picture, then relocated to the next stop in the butterfly cafeteria and waited again.

This went on for about forty minutes. When I got the slide film developed, I realized I had about twenty shots of the dull underside of the monarch’s folded wing, and only one or two decent shots of the full butterfly, but those images were kind of overwhelmed by the seaweed.

I got sore knees from hovering on my haunches, and instead of getting the image of a lifetime, I got frustrated because the creatures were too quick for me to capture their full beauty for my book. So what’s the message here?

Is it the adage: “Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it comes softly, and sits on your shoulder”? Or is it: “Next time try a tripod, a beach chair, and some faster film”?

Being from Buffalo, I’m thinking maybe it’s more like, “Beauty, like the summer, is fleeting. So when you come across it, breathe it in, appreciate it, and replay it in your mind’s eye often. Don’t worry so much about trapping it in two dimensions.”

Beauty, like the Buffalo Bills, will come back.