Mariposas de invierno

Trapped in the city in the hot last week of July, the narrator recalls a scene from many years ago: children play in the village street and, every now and then, they find a half-dead rhinoceros beetle on the sidewalk. . The scene was repeating itself on specific nights in July: just then, and you won't be there to see it. His partner sleeps in the next room, recovering from a stroke. The narrator feels like the rhinoceros beetle of her childhood: a wounded animal, run over by life, always missing a leg, barely moving and unable to take flight. Over three summers, Winter Butterflies and Other Stories of Nature reconstructs the universe of family relationships, linked to insects that roam meadows and forests and live with people. Three main characters support the story - a man, a woman, and their son. The goal: to return to the forest after a long healing process. With an extraordinary sensitivity, Julià Guillamon accompanies us to the foot of a linden tree in full pollination, to a small square in front of a hostel where winged ants flutter, to an abandoned country house where the most beautiful butterflies suck the pulp of plums. Winter butterflies and other stories of nature begins as a bestiary but then the insects take a back seat and the insects are the people. Those critters, real and extraordinarily documented, are in this book a symbolic element to connect the living with the dead, the bridge of memory that links the dream world of childhood with the disenchantment of adults. It is also the border between the city that has erased nature and the rural environment that clings to it as a sign of an identity that is blurred. A reunion with the essential, what builds us and what holds us when everything seems to collapse. Because taking care of the earth we also take care of ourselves.