Patience, Vigilence

Sitting on my front porch this morning (which, apparently, I’ve been doing a lot over these past several months), I began to think about the bees. We have a flower bed just in front of the porch full of plants with Latin names that I can never remember, but which My Bride can rattle off without thinking and also without an Roman accent. She’s the scientist in our household; I refer to technical/botanical entities as “thingy’s” and “purple stuff” and “the white plants by the walkway.” She knows what I’m talking about and I don’t have to embarrass myself by trying to speak of plants like I know something about them, which, again, I don’t.

But, ah, the bees. The little pollinators have been busy as, well, bees this spring and summer. We sometimes eat our oatmeal on the porch before the sun clears the treetops and the lovely Atlanta humidity chases us back into the house. This provides a morning ritual free of TV news and allows us to greet our neighbors who walk by with their dogs, or run by trying to avoid the COVID-15, as in fifteen pounds added due to quarantining at home with home delivery of frozen lasagna and sleeve after sleeve of Oreo DoubleStuff cookies. The bees provide a calming going-about-business-as-usual-without-fuss-or-handwashing-or-masking-up-or-worrying-about-toilet-paper-substitutes kind of activity, buzzing from blossom to blossom pollinating the heck out of the purple stuff. If I could “speak bee,” I’d ask them if they knew about COVID-19 and the fact that the world has changed remarkably in just a few months and that there is not much in the way of a light at the end of the tunnel just now.

If they were a snarky kind of bee, they might reply with a little, you know, “Yeah, tell me about it. Have you thought about the fact that when you bomb the heck out of the mosquitos in your yard with Bob’s Worry-Free Mosquito Fog and Sure-Fire Pest Killer, that you’re killing us, too? And we know that Fog likely comes from a lab in Wuhan. Don’t tell us your problems.”

But, I think, based upon their solitary focus on their very own task at hand, which is to pollinate the heck out of the purple stuff, that our particular bees might not be so snarky and might show a little empathy with our plight. “Yes, we’ve noticed that you’re around too much lately. (I’ll let that pass as sarcasm, rather than snark.) Thanks for taking the time to plant all of this lovely purple stuff (bees are notoriously inexact when referring to flowers and plants) for us to work with. (He floated to another purple blossom.) You’ll get through this tunnel. Life is never an easy path, nor a straight flight. You have to zig-zag through it all to get to the best blossoms. Patience, vigilance. (With this, he lifted straight up, hovered for the blink of an eye, then settled onto a cluster of white petals low and near the walkway.) And besides, you’ve been home enough to plant and care for all of the purple stuff and these white plants by the walkway and all the other thingy's in the yard. It has all worked out. And you’ve met neighbors you didn’t know you had. Relax, dude…just do what you have to do. We do us. You do you.”

Now I really hadn’t realized that bees were so philosophical, but, then, amazing things happen during the slowdown of a pandemic. We have to do what we have to do, just like bees. And just as bees work in unison to protect and grow the hive, so too should we follow their example. With patience and vigilance, there will be a light at the end of the tunnel – but it will require a pragmatic, concerted effort by everyone in our hive of humanity to pass through.

Oh, and the bees did have one last request: please don’t call Bob anymore…