The Bumble Bee

I spotted a bumble bee today. A huge fat bumble bee sailing easily through the air, bouncing from bloom to bloom. And I breathed a sigh of relief.


Of all the things that I have to worry about, I know this shouldn't have been the top priority. But it was. I was worried about the bees. Terrified actually, about the bees. About the lack of them.

I first noticed last spring, when a coworker had a cookout and it was completely uninterrupted by our nagging friends. A lifetime of swatting, running from, fussing at, attempting to kill bees, it suddenly occurred to me that I missed them. Like that relative you can't stand until you don't see him anymore. Until the option to see him is taken from you by deaths devastation. Thats when you realize that you truly loved them, even though they annoyed you in a never ending way, because they are no longer around for you to ever be upset with them again.

So, the rest of the summer went by, beeless. And my daughter, who had been stung the year before by the never ending swarm of bees around our yard in past years, asked, "what happened to our bumblebees mommy? I don't see any."

And I got a sick feeling in my stomach. What is happening in the world, or to our world, when lifelong constants begin to disappear? What does that mean in the overall scope of things? In every catastrophic movie it is the disappearance of little things that signal something huge is happening, changing, and it won't be good. With global warming, the war, the radiation that is making its way across the globe from our "Iraq strikes" of a few years ago, the damages cause by gas leaks in water and nuclear exposure in the air, our world is changing. And if the common things, like bees, began to be extinct, how far behind are we?

So, I have prayed for the return of our bees. Of normalcy. Of watching little girls be terrified, little boys swatting them away, the nostalgia of a good cookout complete with food, folks, flys and bees. A prayer that my kids will inherit memories that involve dandelions and "wishes," hopscotch and double dutch, good life when you can stare into a clean sky and spin yourself dizzy. Watching a pesky mosquito, squealing in delighted disgust at a huge spider web, pushing at a daddy long legs with a twig, luring ants out of an anthill with a piece of candy, spending unlimited hours in the evening and night trying to trap and release fireflies. Maybe it was just my childhood, but those were peaceful memories, good times. I don't want to have to show my grandkids pictures of bees, as some extinct past creature, something that they can't even conceive of. There is something simply sad about that notion.

So, I thanked God, today, for the sight of that one plump bumble bee...Maybe, just maybe, it signifies the return to normalcy.