Butterflies Are Free

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. ~ Charles Dickens

Last week, I tried to capture a shot of this butterfly in my yard (for a photo essay on gardening yet to come) - this one, to me, is "cabbage-white" because there's just a tinge of greenish-yellow throughout its wings. Summer is winding down - I aim to enjoy what's left of it, because I do not care for winter!

The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (his honest idiocy of flight)


Will never now, it is too late, master the art of flying straight.


~ Robert Graves

Here's more about the butterfly (there's no proof that the word is derived from "flutter-by"):

As author and etymologist David Feldman once asked, “who put the butter in butterfly?” The English common name did originate from the relatively simple combination of “butter” and “fly,” there’s a written old English citation for buttorfleoge, but the literal origin is lost. Some sources have erroneously suggested that the excrement of butterflies is thought to resemble butter. The problem with this, of course, is that other than to void excess water, butterflies do not excrete! Caterpillars do because they are the active growing stage, although a simple consideration of what they eat will make you wonder why anyone would consider that it, commonly called frass, resembled butter! More likely origins include considering that the males of the common brimstone butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni, Pieridae) of England are butter-colored, or that, as author Samuel Jackson suggested, butterflies and the churning of butter are the simultaneous harbingers of spring, or that the word derives from the old myth that witches and fairies stole butter in the night, in the form of butterflies.

http://www.aworldforbutterflies.com/etymology.htm

Thanks for fluttering by today!