Look closer next time to make sure you don't miss the beauty

I was sitting by the pool doing my usual Sudoku puzzles, hoarding the shade and trying not to melt when I felt something tickle my shin. Thinking it was yet another pesky house fly, I started to swipe at it without looking, but for some reason, I didn't. I stopped and looked instead.

It wasn't a fly, it was a butterfly, staking its claim on the salt mine he'd just discovered on my knee. The tickling wasn't bad, hardly even noticeable after a while, so I let him hang around -- literally.

After a while. I was afraid I would forget he was there and would swat and kill him accidentally, so I nudged him with a fingertip to urge him to move along.

He did -- right on to my finger tip.

He sat there, as calm as can be, and let me study him up close.

This was not a pretty butterfly, one of those sparkling blue or green or gold creations that inspire thoughts of fairies, pixies, unicorns, a flat rate income tax and other fantastical myths.

The underside of his wings, the ones you could see best because he held his wings closed most of the time, were just flat out ugly. Practical, of course, since they looked like bits of old tree bark, ragged edges and all. Perched on the side of a maple or an oak, he'd be perfectly camouflaged. But they were colors that made me think more about Gollum than Galadriel.

I puffed a tiny breath of air at him to make him open up. Surely, there would be a rainbow of visual delight, a bountiful beautimous binocular buffet of the senses waiting beneath all that drab brown ...

Nope, he was pretty ugly with the wings spread, too. His colors were Halloween orange with matte black, and no particular, intricate stained-glass pattern such as monarch butterfly might have. More like a cheap foreign knockoff of a what some pottery painter in a third world country might think a monarch butterfly should look like.

In other words, not even close.

I wiggled my finger and he landed on my shoulder. As he did, the sun struck his wing at an odd angle and I saw a shimmery flash of cobalt blue. I coaxed the Ugly Butterfly back onto my finger and held him out in the one spot of sun that had invade my shady corner. His wings were still ragged around the edges and still mottled brown and gray, but the light brought out details that were amazing.

Instead of looking like a scrap of dryer lint, the wings now looked like a tapestry -- a slightly worn tapestry, but still filled with subtle beauty. The sun picked out tiny beads of gold under the brown, a cobalt border, and bronze wisps across the gray background. There was a pattern there, it just wasn't an obvious one.

How many times, I wondered, have I dismissed something out of hand because it didn't look how I thought it should look. We get these preconceived notions in our heads and when the result is not what we expected, our first reaction is to reject it.

I remember one time taking a huge pottery bowl full of sliced and sugared strawberries to a family gathering. The bowl was a hand-thrown work of art, colonial blue glaze with a tan pattern that looked like it was running over the edge. One of the family members saw it, and thought it was an overflowing bowl of brown betty, a favorite dessert from her childhood.

When she found out we were supplying strawberries and shortcake and ice cream and not apple brown betty, she told us how much she loved strawberries -- but I could still hear the disappointment in her voice.

The funny thing was, if we'd used a different bowl, she would have never thought about the childhood dessert, and would have been just as thrilled with the berries.

How many potential friends or lovers have been turned away because they didn't fit our image? How many excellent meals have been denied because it didn't look like what Mom used to fix?

I don't think the answer is to lower our expectations -- but to adjust our vision.

Things are often not what they appear to be -- they are often much, much more. Take the time to look at them in a different light -- sometimes literally -- and you can find the beads of gold in the soft, gray landscape of a butterfly's wing.