Content Warning: The novel and this guide contain discussions of child death/miscarriage, alcohol addiction, and suicide.

“Like a hunted animal, or a racehorse, winning or losing felt exactly alike at this stage, with the same coursing of blood and shortness of breath.”

At the beginning of the novel, Dellarobia is climbing up the trail to the higher end of her husband’s family’s land to have an affair with Jimmy, a local phone repairman. She sees the affair as a means by which to escape, in some fashion, the dead-end marriage she has been in for 11 years. Dellarobia’s comparison of herself to an animal being hunted echoes the conflict that exists within her and establishes the novel’s interest in The Complexities of Marriage and Motherhood.

“Preston and Cordelia when they later arrived were both blonds, cut from the Turnbow cloth, but that first one that came in its red pelt of fur was a mean wild thing like her. Roping a pair of dumbstruck teenagers into a shotgun wedding and then taking off with a laugh, leaving them stranded. Leaving them trying five years for another baby, just to fill a hole nobody meant to dig in the first place.”

Dellarobia reflects on how she ended up in a marriage with Cub as she walks the path to meet with Jimmy. An unplanned pregnancy ushered in a teenage marriage between two people with nothing in common but the child Dellarobia eventually miscarried. Instead of divorcing or considering what was best for both of them, Dellarobia and Cub tried to have another child.

“She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such room for being. This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.”

Dellarobia’s first encounter with the valley full of monarch butterflies is described as almost a religious experience: a vision or miracle of sorts. On a day when she was deliberately planning to throw her marriage away through adultery, the butterflies and the image they create stop her from proceeding with her plan.