Here’s an excerpt from my top secret cook book/diary/adventure book from when I was 10 years old.

These are carefully written down instructions on how to create a little “butterfly farm” – the instructions invlude catching butterfly larvae, keeping them in a specially prepared plastic container with nettles, wait for them to build their chrysalis, and then watch them fly out as butterflies.

Animal rights and all those things were not really something I understood at that time (I once kidnapped a little duckling from the park..) although I was really into protecting and saving hurt animals. From a very early age, all kinds of insects were my favourite animals to study (maybe because they were all I could catch). I caught grasshoppers, spiders and big beautiful moths and I would run around with my magnifying glass and look at their little heads and legs and compare what I saw with my big encyclopedia of animals that was like my bible. I took care of several birds and kittens, and once I “saved” an injured bumblebee from a group of ants and kept it in a jar for two days (filled with leaves and other things that I thought bumblebees eat.. haha) until it could fly again. The jar had breathing holes of course. I was very happy.

Photo from 1995 with the magpie “Skrollan” that I had for a week. She had an injured wing.. but I was still sad when she finally flew away.

Every time I had to say good bye to an animal I had to make an effort to combat the natural urge to own, and accept what I knew was right. Learning about breakups at age 9, life was hard. haha

Did I mention that I didn’t have any siblings? Thank you for an exciting childhood, oh big black Polish book from 1989.