A day or two after I cut down the thumb-sized branches of the Balete tree, Ja woke me up to see what hung from among the leaves in the morning of September 8. This was the amazing sight I saw.
It hung there unmoving for the entire day that Ja suspected it was already dead. "Butterflies die so fast," he said.
But it was not just an ordinary butterfly because it was five or 10 times as big. For three days, it hung there unmoving until it disappeared. As soon as Ja saw that it was no longer there, he went up the stairs to find if it was in Pa's old room. "Why did you do that?I asked Ja, who always saw some supernatural meaning to extraordinarily beautiful phenomenon. "Why did you have to check the moth's body upstairs?"
"I was expecting to find a man with butterfly wings in the old man's room," he said.
