Hailey’s house of wings: Butterfly keeper’s 45 reasons to believe in small miracles

How one woman turns fragile lives into lasting testimony

SPOKANE

There is something subversive about Hailey Seubert’s living room. Forty-five frames of butterflies hang on her walls. Iridescent, still, and impossibly beautiful, like tiny stained-glass windows in a cathedral dedicated to the fragile and the fleeting. Visitors tend to stop mid-sentence. Some lean closer. A few ask if they are real.

They are.

“People always assume they’re fake,” says Hailey, 27, with the patient smile of someone who has answered this question many times. “But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Something real is always more extraordinary than something made.”

The collection began with a grief, as the most meaningful things often do. In 2015, Hailey’s grandmother, Margaret Kathleen Seubert, the sort of woman who collected beauty the way others collect debts, passed away and left behind a peculiar inheritance. Margaret had 27 granddaughters. To each, she bequeathed a single butterfly, preserved and framed with the care of a museum curator. It was an unusual last will. It was also, by any measure, a masterpiece of grandmothering.

Hailey and Margaret had been, in the truest sense, best friends. Each summer, Hailey would make the pilgrimage to Cottonwood, Idaho, where time moved at a different pace and her grandmother moved with it. Unhurried, knowing, full of wonder. The butterfly she inherited was a piece of Margaret pressed into amber, a summer afternoon made permanent.

“I couldn’t just stop at one,” Hailey says, with the sheepish honesty of a woman who has never once regretted a butterfly.

She found her supplier almost by accident. Silver Post, a shop in Las Vegas, Nevada, has become something of a Mecca for the ethically-minded collector. Its proprietor sources exclusively from zoos, butterflies that have lived full, well-tended lives and departed this world in the manner of minor aristocrats. Naturally, with dignity, and without drama. They are then preserved and framed, transformed from the ephemeral into the permanent.

The shop carries seven species regularly, though at its most abundant it has stocked up to fifty. Prices range from a modest $35 to a jaw-dropping $450 for The Monarch, which, given its name and bearing, seems entirely justified in commanding a premium. Hailey’s most prized acquisition cost $75, which feels, in the economy of beauty, like an extraordinary bargain.

“None of them were killed for collection,” she is quick to note. “They just — finished. And then someone made sure they weren’t forgotten.”

This ethos, that nothing deserving of love should simply disappear unwitnessed, runs like a thread through Hailey’s entire life. She grew up on a farm in Cheney, Washington, in a family of six, where her father worked as a rock crusher and her mother taught at the local school district. The farm had cows, pigs, horses, and chickens. It also had a little girl who staged one-woman protests at slaughter time, arms crossed, heart loud.

She has five cats and three dogs. She works at Lakeland Village in Medical Lake, where she began expanding her collection in 2019. And when two kittens were abandoned in a box behind her house, malnourished, freezing, arriving into the world with all the bad luck of creatures nobody wanted, it was Hailey who called the vet. It was Hailey who stayed. One kitten faced potential neurological damage from oxygen deprivation; the other needed flea treatment. She kept the sick one. “The sicker they are,” she says, “the harder it is to walk away.”

Her original dream was to open an animal rescue. The butterflies, in a way, suggest she already has, just with a slightly different clientele, and considerably quieter nights. There is a word for what Hailey Seubert does, but collecting seems too cold for it. She is, at her core, a keeper of things that might otherwise be lost: her grandmother’s summers, a zoo butterfly’s final chapter, a freezing kitten’s second chance at warmth. The frames on her walls are not trophies. They are testimonies.

Forty-five butterflies. Each one a life, fully lived.

Each one, still beautiful.

To look at her wall is to see a global map of flight. There is a profound irony in Seubert’s hobby. The woman who couldn’t bear the slaughter of animals for meat at her family farm now finds peace in the stillness of these creatures. Yet, there is a logic to it. In these frames, the animals she loves so fiercely are finally safe from the elements, the predators, and the passage of time.

In the 45 frames hanging in her home, Hailey Seubert has captured 45 moments of stillness in a life dedicated to the loud, messy, and beautiful work of saving what can be saved, and honoring what couldn’t be.

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