Pita the curious soul

By Lucero De Alva

Sometimes she would travel, always with her cat, to gardens, chasing butterflies or engaging in long, winding, and serious conversations with worms, caterpillars, or any other creature she found interesting. (For her, all of them were interesting.) She even watched the spider spin its web keenly, for she was smitten by the seemingly commonplace complexities of such things. She, along with her best friend, Polo, pranced from garden to garden in search of living creatures other than humans.

But no garden was as dear to her as the garden of her aunt, Mrs. Adela. That garden was full of flowers, whose beauty was exuberant and vibrant enough to attract butterflies from a great distance. But butterflies were not the only reason why Pita ventured constantly into the garden. Aunt Adela was also a big attraction. Pita enjoyed conversing with her aunt who, in her spare time, told her numerous funny stories from her childhood over sparkling, clear, cold glasses of pink lemonade. Pita would demand her aunt tell her a story and then jump straight into the garden, running after the different colored butterflies, capturing and releasing them according to her moods. There was one more reason why Pita liked her Aunt Adela so much: Just like Pita, Aunt Adela admired sunflowers, and she had an undying faith in her belief that they were the happiest flowers in the world.

Pita had read in a book—she was a bookworm too—that around 200,000 species of butterflies are present on planet Earth. Therefore, she was on a secret mission to capture one specimen of each kind (at least) in glass jars.

(The writer is an author of a series of children’s books that will be released in these upcoming months; here she’s given fragments from her first book, PITA).