She doesn\u2019t stop at just the one. She lays hundreds
\nof little white pearls, one after the other, in piles here<\/p>\n
and there. Color-coded, the eggs turn green
\nand donut-shaped just before they hatch.<\/p>\n
Once loosed from the shell, they are tiny lime-green
\ncaterpillars less than half an inch long.<\/p>\n
This particular moth larva devours willow leaves
\nlike candy. Their tiny heads move up and down<\/p>\n
the leaf as it disappears, bit by bit, down its gullet.
\nFrom there, the growth spurt begins and never ends <\/p>\n
until one day, after half a tree\u2019s worth of willow leaves
\nhave disappeared, it stops. Then the caterpillar<\/p>\n
climbs out of itself, abandons the husk of \u2018pillar like
\nan old fur coat dropped in front of the new changeling.<\/p>\n
Now, there is a rotund, shortened version of the cat\u2019
\nthat squirms and wriggles like Jabba the Hutt,<\/p>\n
changing color in circles first, from bright green
\nto amber, and finally all at once to chocolate brown.<\/p>\n
That is the chrysalis laying there under the dirt. What
\nwas green and chomping will now sleep through winter<\/p>\n
and then emerge next summer as a large moth
\nwith scalloped wings who will never eats a thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
She doesn\u2019t stop at just the one. She lays hundreds of little white pearls, one after the other, in piles here and there. Color-coded, the eggs turn green and donut-shaped just before they hatch. Once loosed from the shell, they are tiny lime-green caterpillars less…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":972,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/972"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42006,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41986\/revisions\/42006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}