The bees ignored the buzz. And so, for a minute or two, could we.
It was a Saturday, the final day under a curfew set by the mayor after unrest in Baltimore City. It had been a scary week, with wild swings between worrying about ourselves, our Bolton Hill home, and our favorite city places and also whether fellow Baltimore residents — those so angered over the death of a man in police custody — could themselves stay safe as they continued to protest peacefully (Mary among them at one point). I worried about the School of Nursing over in East Baltimore, even though very few problems had been reported outside of West Baltimore and a little bit of Downtown. It never felt as though the whole city would explode but it felt enough like it could. From where we sat, the endless rotor noise of the police and National Guard choppers hovering above our house and circling our neighborhood was annoying at first, becoming darn near maddening.
How could this possibly end well? We fretted aloud as Mary kept track of events via Twitter.
And just outside our door, in the mad tangle of a gnarled, old wisteria vine, the bumblebees were oblivious to everything but the nectar that awaited them within the fresh purple-blue blooms. It was bee-petting time.
Mary’s birthday tends to coincide with the first wisteria bloom of the season (hence the festive poster I made for her this year) and she finds it great fun to celebrate by sniffing the blooms as the bees fly drunkenly all around her. When one alights for a few seconds on a nearby flower, she’ll extend her index finger and gently pet the furry yellow portion of its upper back. She reports it to be incredibly soft. I have not had the pleasure. “Bee” is a synonym for “ouch” in my personal dictionary. I took my share of stings while running barefoot through the clover that covered our shoddy “baseball field” as a kid. But whatever. It was Mary’s moment, in the middle of all this angst, the bees just doing what bees do and a couple of us Baltimoreans trying to do the same.
She giggled as a bumblebee she was petting took flight, its wings flapping against her finger to create an angry-sounding “BBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZ!” She apologized to the bee, which simply moved to the next bar stool.
– Steve St. Angelo
