I’ve been listening to Barbara Kingsolver read her new novel, Flight Behavior,<\/i> on my car CD player, and I have to wonder what the other drivers must think of me as I shake my head and talk to myself.\u00a0 Of course there are lots of people with those little earpieces talking to themselves nowadays, so they probably assume I’m up to speed technologically.<\/p>\n

My head shaking isn’t negative.\u00a0 Quite the contrary.\u00a0 I can’t help exclaiming, “Damn, she’s good.”\u00a0\u00a0 Or just “Wow.”\u00a0The woman is master of the metaphor and sneaks them in so slyly that they flit on by like the butterflies in the story.<\/p>\n

Kingsolver tells stories about the universal lessons of life forms, human and otherwise.\u00a0Some take flight out of necessity and others because they can’t necessarily adapt to their physical and emotional surroundings.\u00a0 In this story, a young mother in the mountains of eastern Tennessee has an epiphany of sorts because she forgot to bring her glasses with her on a walk up a hill.\u00a0 When she sees millions of Monarch butterflies on an adjacent hill doing what butterflies do during roosting season, she thinks it’s a message from either god or her mother-in-law.\u00a0The vision is so powerful that she changes her mind about committing adultery in an old cabin hidden among the trees and goes back home.<\/p>\n

The story wraps itself around the question about why millions of Monarch butterflies chose to roost in eastern Tennessee, rather than their natural habitat in Mexico.\u00a0The reader learns just about everything there is to know about Monarch butterflies, without being force fed a whole semester of entomology.\u00a0 Anyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock for 30 years knows the moral of the story is going to be about climate change.<\/p>\n

On one of my errand runs recently, I passed a little church on a country road and read on its message board: “Judgment Day is Coming.”\u00a0 Yes it is.\u00a0But we’re not going to line up before St. Peter.\u00a0We’re going to face each other down over the dwindling supply of natural resources and see who is fit to survive. When wheat won’t grow in the breadbaskets of the planet anymore, how will we adapt?\u00a0When superstorms aren’t “super” any more, can we afford to rebuild over and over?<\/p>\n

Climate scientists tell us the average temperature on Earth has already risen two degrees.\u00a0The National Geographic Society offers a DVD called “Six Degrees Could Change the World” where the viewer sees, by way of some very clever photographic tricks, what parts of the world will look like when the temperature has risen\u00a0by four degrees, five degrees and then six degrees.\u00a0Lower Manhattan will flood just like it did recently during Superstorm Sandy.\u00a0Only this time, the water won’t recede.\u00a0Islands in the South Pacific are already disappearing.\u00a0Well, not really\u00a0disappearing, just not visible above water.\u00a0California and Florida have already\u00a0lost expanses of\u00a0beaches, as the ocean laps up against the pitiful piles of rocks meant to keep it away.\u00a0Meanwhile, the lack of rain and snow in the\u00a0 Mississippi River watershed has closed the once “mighty” river to commercial traffic.<\/p>\n

The butterflies found a resting place in eastern Tennessee despite the distinct possibility that their little bodies will freeze and die.\u00a0But they couldn’t go home to Mexico because they would not survive there either.<\/p>\n

When I finish listening to Kingsolver’s story sermon, I’ll let you know how it ends.\u00a0\u00a0Or maybe the story isn’t really over.<\/p>\n

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