I’d be delighted to write some “Nature Study” leaflets for your series, she wrote. After more than two decades of teaching high school and also running an extracurricular Young Lepidopterists Club in our village, I know how to interest children in the outside world and could devise standardized lessons any teacher might find useful as she begins her own program of Nature Study. I imagine one leaflet about the general study of moths and butterflies. Another, perhaps—drawing on the excellent work of Samuel Scudder, which I know has often inspired you—about the study of monarch migration. Others might follow, if these suited.

Or they’d follow, if she found the time—what had happened to her time? She taught her classes and prepared new classes; ran her labs and devised laboratory exercises; worked on projects with certain former students, especially Bernard. She directed this club, for which, since she’d started encouraging young pupils, she now had to design new projects. She tended her house and her garden and the caterpillar room while also, especially after Hester got pregnant again, helping care for Marion and Caroline. But this was important, and as soon as she heard back from Anna Comstock, she stole time to begin drafting a Nature Study leaflet she titled “Caterpillars and Their Moths.”

Not just an explanation of the life cycles of some common moths, but a way to shift the students’ focus from the glamorous winged forms, which often lived only a few days, to the resourceful crawling state in which they really spent most of their lives. The little worms hatching out of their eggs; the busily feeding middle instars with their fascinating molts; the fat creatures, decorated with hairs and tubercles and horns; and finally the astonishing transformations as they pupated—any schoolchild would be drawn to these. She wrote some introductory pages about necessary equipment and the rudiments of caterpillar anatomy and physiology, and in a separate notebook listed possible candidates for full life histories. Hornworms, which turn into hawkmoths. Hog caterpillars, which turn into fat-bodied Nessus sphinx moths. Perhaps the yellow-headed caterpillars with knobs first yellow and later red, emerging from leaf-wrapped cocoons as gigantic Promethea silk moths? All easily found, appealing to any young naturalist. But before she could begin work on those, Elaine was born: a month early, tiny but strong, with a cry so piercing she seemed to sense this would be the only way to get what she needed.