Woke up well, talked to Melanie for over an hour which was really nice after several weeks of not talking. Do you know the feeling of not able of being fully you or fully known outside of a context? That's how I feel about my sister - without knowing her or especially us together, you can't really know me. Getting to catch up with her is a delight because of that - reclaiming who I am.
Sat in the park and ate my Sunflour croissant sandwich and drank coffee. Noticed a bee really struggling on the ground below me. It was on it's back and "turtleing" it's legs to get on its feet. I grabbed a piece of dried grass and tried to flip it over and it just flipped back over. It looked paralyzed or drunk. I wondered why it was acting like that so I got it up from the crushed gravel it was floundering on and put it on the rock wall I was sitting on. It was more sturdy on top but still was flipping around. I realized the rock was pretty cold (the weather just turned here from 90s to 40s) and wondered if that was the issue - if the bee was too cold to have good motor control.
I just watched it for a bit and as it started to try less and less to move, I wondered if it had been bit by a spider and poisoned and if I was watching a bee convulse to death. I looked around where I found it on the ground and saw a fire ant. Wondering if that was the bee's enemy, I moved it down in front of the ant. Much nervous reaction from the bee but complete apathy from the ant.
I was starting to wonder if the best thing I could do for this bee was to just squish it but actually wanted to see if it would just die. I picked it back up, put it on my black pants that were warm from the sun's rays and it was still falling over itself but seemingly more energized than a few minutes earlier.
I put it in my hand where I could help it stay on it's feet longer and tried to pet it. It tried to fly off after a bit but did so poorly, just crashing into the ground. Unlocked it back up, went from pants to hand again and once more, it had a doomed flight. We repeated this process a few times and it eventually flew straight! Up into the air and out of site. I hope it found its give or got eaten by a bird. Rotting on the ground for ant food is less satisfying though probably just as needed for our ecology.
On the walk home, I was disturbed by the amount of awful noise - loud trucks, screeching things, clangs of "progress". It made me wonder about the difference between noise pollution and overall loudness of what nature provides versus what man provides. I hopefully will dive into that a bit more with numbers soon.
I took a slightly different route home and, as I was pondering a house that could have been an electronic alert or a bug, I saw some big red berries on a vine. I was shocked - tomatoes! Growing right on top of "polk salad". I don't know if someone threw an old tomato plant out there or what but it was very cool seeing an unkempt cherry tomato plant spreading like a weed and giving naturally not-dense fruit. No Gardener and yet there it was. No one to pluck suckers or savagely hack apart horn worms yet there were sun bathing tomatoes in October.
They were delicious.
