bees – Skelton Sketches

My overgrown oregano patch has been just alive with bees this summer!

Their drone is the sound of summer.

“Busy as a bee” seems an apt idiom in view of their incessant buzzing about, so I had to chuckle at a poem that I discovered one morning this week.

Ignoring breakfast dishes I had plunked down on the couch to check out my new library acquisition—a collection of Ogden Nash poems titled I Wouldn’t Have Missed It. Actually, before I even decided to sit down with this book, I had burst out laughing in the middle of the kitchen just sampling Ogden’s word play. Oh my. I rarely get my elusive funny bone tickled like that. Laughter, the perfect gift for a serious soul; I felt like God had hand-picked the book for me! So I postponed dishes and read poems for the next happy while!

In this particular poem Nash wryly suggests that only man was created to live by the sweat of his brow.

“So far as I know, mankind is the only section of creation
That is doomed to either pers- or ex-piration.”

He goes on to playfully debunk bees’ apparent industriousness–

“And bees don’t do anything either, bees just have a reputation for industry because they are sharp enough to buzz,

And people hear a bee buzzing and don’t realize that buzzing isn’t any trouble for a bee so they think that it is doing more than it actually does.”

–and then he proposes the comical idea of a bee laughing. I love it!

“So next time you are about to expend some enthusiasm on the bee’s wonderful industrial powers.

Just remember that that wonderful bee would die laughing if you asked it to change places with you and get its brow moist while you went around spending the day smelling flowers.”

Ha! Now I must go smell some flowers and watch some laughing bees! ( :

Take time to smile today–and find something that makes you laugh. With God in control of the world, and watching out for our well-being we can afford the luxury!

–LS

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Rom.8:31-32

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The poem cited is: “Grasshoppers are very Intelligent” p.51 of I Wouldn’t Have Missed It—selected poems by Ogden Nash, 1972 (Thank God for libraries that don’t toss all their old books!!)

To read the poem in its entirety go here.
Or to find a chuckle of your own, check out this website: http://www.poemhunter.com/ogden-nash/poems/

Just in from chasing bumblebees in the garden… a fine pastime for a sunny spring day, while the sun plays peek-a-boo with encroaching clouds–some fluffy white, some frowning gray…

The eider down of dandelions-past-their-prime, now reseeding for future generations, is upstaged by the glow of buttercup faces…But the real draw is the overwintered kale now gone to seed, the garden’s first brightness in spring.

The peas are peeking out; potatoes are eyeing sunshine from their dark furrows. The comfrey’s come back with all the power of a mighty weed.

How did I think I would let this season go, for a change, and not do any gardening? Sheer nonsense. I can’t keep myself out of the beds—searching for emerging seedlings, planted and otherwise…on the lookout for new life, excited by the growth that comes once my precious seeds are committed to the dead earth…

It’s hard to let them go. What if they don’t germinate and grow? All will be lost. There’s no instant manufacturing of more seed, only a long season of growth and fruitfulness and maturity. And then the gathering and the storing and the patient waiting for spring. Once in the seed packets, nicely labeled, the seed is mine—holding all the potential of a flourishing garden of veggies and blooms. But it ‘abides alone’, useless really, (no matter how lovely the packaging), if I fail to take the plunge and commit my precious seeds to the ground….

The painful part is passing now. Most of my seeds are planted and hopeful I ramble through the yard bending to see the first shoots, and finding the rewards here and there and the springing hope of summer’s bounty and autumn’s harvest…Yes, it’s a fine day for chasing bumblebees in the garden…

And so glad I am for the plants that reliably spring out of hibernation every spring, mature and ready to bloom where they’ve been planted in bygone years… They brighten my hopes for the rest yet to come!

Wishing you a happy ramble with the bumblebees, rejoicing in the hope of springtime…

–LS

“He that goes forth weeping, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing bringing his sheaves with him.” Ps.126:6

“…unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone…” Jn.12:24

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For a close-up of some of my precious seeds, go here.

Tag: bees

Carefree Bees…

Chasing Bumblebees…