Bees

We’re in the middle of the coldest, wettest spring in as long as I can remember. Every day we wake up and it’s the same 50 degrees that it has been for the past four months. And all of our late spring vegetables have sprouted…sputtered…and died. We’ll spend June replanting if Seattle can ever shake off the cloud cover that definitely should be gone by now. (Don’t tell anyone, but generally, from June to October, our skies are clear, blue, and beautiful.)

One springtime tradition that hasn’t been interrupted is the return of the bees. Our yard is, how do you say, unkempt, so there are a lot of wildflowers and flowering bushes that we leave a bit wild so there’s plenty of food for the pollinators. Which means, if it’s not raining, they’re out there. When our rhododendron blooms, you can hear the buzzing long before you see a single fuzzy bug. It’s a bummer for my kids, because there’s this amazing space under the branches, a perfect hideout, but when it’s at its most beautiful, the threat of being stung is a little too close for comfort.

There’s a patch of big, friendly daisies in our front yard that Forrest refuses to mow over. I’m not sure how it came to be there, but each year, that amorphous patch grows bigger and bigger and he just walks around it. Appearances be damned, there are flowers here.

I think those daisies are a little bit magic too. Each morning when I yank my cranky kids out the door to school, we stop in front of them to get recombobulated: put the water bottle in the right pocket, where’s my folder?, did you remember your library books? — all the thousand last trips inside to make sure they have what they need.

And in the middle of the cloudy, misty mornings, I stand there, counting to 100 to calm down as they fight and fret and ask me for things that I told them to pack themselves. Right in front of those daisies. And for the last week, I’ve realized, as I try to regain my zen, that each night, a half dozen bees have made their beds there. As we’re leaving, one or two might be just waking up. But mostly, their fluffy bodies remain all curled up, waiting and wishing for summer to come, just like me.

I don’t know how they possibly stay safe right out there in the open, but I looked it up - bees really do sleep in flowers occasionally. And what it is about those daisies that attracts them, I don’t know. Maybe it’s that they know, those flowers are kept sacred until their blooming time is over. And even then, we won’t till that ground for as long as they grow. Maybe it’s that the bees know they belong here. There will be a steady supply of new wildflowers popping up all over our yard. Half of that is carelessness on my part. A few wildflower mixes strewn over the years and now I can’t get rid of the damn things.

But the other half of that is the utter delight I feel when I see and hear the buzzing. Those bees take what would normally be considered weeds, the product of my failure to keep a proper garden and turn it into nourishment. I want to be that kind of busy bee. The one who takes what exists naturally in the world, the ordinary, boring, even irksome things, and thrives on it.

So no, those daisies won’t be getting mown down any time soon.

Appearances be damned, there’s magic here.