Nature Lessons

A Story by Willys Watson

NATURE LESSONS

A Short Story By Willys Watson

On a late spring afternoon Gina and her father sat in wicker chairs on the veranda facing the back yard of their home. Between them a table held glasses of iced tea and the Sunday paper in half read disarray. While he browsed through the Arts Section she intensely studied the activity below them in the well-maintained flower bed that ran the length of the porch. From the larger, long established perennials to the recently planted annuals, all were blooming and Gina watched dozens of bees, a pair of hummingbirds and an odd assortment of butterflies collecting nectar.

"Looks like it’s going to rain tonight, Pop," she stated after a bolt of lightening in the distance distracted her and she glanced towards the ominous clouds in the western sky.

"That’s what the forecast says, Honey."

"Well, it has me wondering where they all go when it rains?"

"If you mean the unicorns they’re certainly not heading towards the ark. So you must mean the gargoyles or garden gnomes, right?" he responded whimsically as he looked over to see her again focused on the nectar collecting frenzy.

"I’m trying to be serious here, Dad!" she chided him as she rolled her eyes. Though Gina did think his reply rated at least a giggle she suppressed her natural inclination to respond to his familiar, often quirky style of humor because she had a full quota of questions to ponder.

"Sunday serious?" he wondered. When she shot her father a stern look he added, "Okay, I can seriously do Sunday serious, Sweety. What have you figured out so far?"

"I know the bees have a hive to go to somewhere and the hummingbirds must have a nest in a bird house or a tree nest to protect them. But what about the butterflies? Do they hide under a porch or hang upside down under a large tree branch when it rains or what?"

"Fascinating question. And you know, I’ve never seen a drowned butterfly in a puddle of water, have you?" When she shook her head no he continued, "It means they find someplace, but I’m not so sure myself where they go so I guess we’ll have to - "

"Ask Oscar, of course, like we always do," she interrupted, teasing him for being so predictable when he didn’t have an answer to one of her questions. Because Gina had developed, from early childhood, the habit of personifying the inanimate objects she spent a lot of time around she had nicknamed her father’s desk top computer Oscar. Though, technically to her, it was Oscar III because it was the third computer he has had in her nine years of life. Her own laptop, which she received for her birthday, was christened Cassie The First

"Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to rub in it. We already know I don’t know everything," he responded with mock embarrassment. "You got any questions I maybe can answer?"

"I was wondering if the nectar from the different types of flowers taste differently to them?" she asked quickly. "I mean, like tea of milk or soda tastes differently to us? Or does it all taste the same to them?"

"Jeeze, what a profoundly interesting question, Gina Martina," he proudly exclaimed as she grinned. "Honey, I’m not even sure if a basic search could answer that."

"Not even Wikipedia?"

"Perhaps if we went deep enough into the search. But I’m guessing not a lot of people have asked this question before. Your’s may be the first and it’s not like how if we asked Yahoo Answers if different blood types tasted differently to vampires we would get a thousand replies, huh?"

"That’s because those people asking have zombie brains," she retorted as she concentrated on the butterflies. "Anyway, I think they should let up a little on the nectar drinking."

"Who, the butterflies? Mon Chi Chi, I think nature lets them know when and how much - "

"But look at them, Dad! The bees and hummingbirds look like they know what they’re doing. But the butterflies just zigzag up and down and sideways and backwards like they don’t even know how to fly in a straight line. It takes them twice as long to get where they’re going."

"They’re just one of nature’s marvelous and vastly varied aerodynamic eccentricities."

"In kid talk I guess you mean it’s because they’re designed that way?"

"Yeah."

"Well, they still act like Uncle Steve when he drinks too much."

"Sadly for him, you’re right," he agreed as he made the connection to her reference point. "But now I’ve got a question for you."

"Yes, Pop, I took the goldfish for a walk this morning."

"That’s funny, Honey Bunny, but I’m wondering if bees or butterflies ever have allergies?"

"Maybe to people or cats, but not to pollen, duh! If bees were allergic to pollen there wouldn’t be any bees, would there? You got any tougher questions?"

"Yeah, Smarty Pants, do you know why hummingbirds hum?"

"Because they don’t know the words to the song. Dad, the first time you tried that on me was way back in kindergarten."

"Yeah, I suppose so." he laughed heartedly. "But I was talking about the sound actually sounding like humming because of the sound their wings make."

"I knew that. I was just giving you back one of your corny old jokes you don’t use anymore, like you remember the one you asked me about why frogs never have nervous breakdowns?"

"Because they get to eat anything that bugs them."

"That one was at least kinda funny when I was a kid, but I’m not a kid now."

"Which is why the joke's complexity has increased with your age and knowledge, right?" he chuckled. When she nodded yes he asked, "So what else is showing up on your deep thought radar screen?"

"Some stuff about the hummingbirds," Gina offered as she give then her full attention. "Don’t they ever get tired of flapping their wings? Don’t they ever take a flying break? When the bees land on the flowers their wings stop moving. Same with the butterflies. But hummingbirds never land on the flowers. They just keep flapping their wings like helicopters if helicopters collected nectar. Don’t they ever get tired?"

"During the day I don’t know. Maybe they do because they wear me out just watching them too long. But at night I know they go into a type of hibernation for the night. I forgot what the exact word for it is but it conserves their energy while they sleep. As to not landing on the flowers I thinks it’s because they weigh too much and their weight would bend or break the flower’s stem. The rest we can look up on Wikipedia."

Gina pulled her chair closer to the railing as her eyes darted from the bees to the butterflies to the hummingbirds and back again. Finally she turned her attention back to her father and he prepared himself for a fresh round of questions and observations from his inquisitive daughter.

"You ever notice how they stay out of each other’s way, Pop? They’re not like people in a crowd or on the sidewalk who bump into each other all the time."

"I’ve noticed that a few times. Perhaps it’s because they don’t have their noises in cell phones to distract them while walking or driving or flying?"

"Dad, stop it!" she scolded him playfully. "I want to know because I think it’s so cool how they keep to their own area or turf and have some kind of a truce or something like that between them."

"Well, I’ve never seen a mid-air collision between them, so - "

"Maybe bees and butterflies talk to each other in some kind of secret insect language? Maybe they divide up the flowers before they start? Or maybe they’re just staying out of each other’s way because they’re just too busy collecting the nectar if they know it’s about to rain?"

"Highly selective evolution has given most of the birds and insects a built in intuitive warning system, so I’m pretty sure they know when it’s about to rain and they must know they have a few hours left before those clouds reach us. As to sharing the nectar I think - "

"But why would the bees share the flowers anyway? They’ve got stingers and they could chase away the butterflies easily and probably the hummingbirds almost as easily and keep all the nectar for themselves."

"Sweety, bees usually don’t sting unless they feel threatened or unless they think their hive is being threatened. It’s not in their DNA."

"You may be right, but that doesn’t answer my question. Why do they share the flowerbed? They don’t have to because they can have the nectar all to themselves."

"Sure they could, Gina. But there’s more than enough to share and greed isn’t built into their DNA. It’s not built into in any of nature’s DNA that I know of."

Gina pushed her chair back against the wall and absentmindedly grabbed a section of the paper from the table as she considered how to respond to his remark. After several minutes she glanced at the newspaper section in her hand, noticed it was the Business Section and tossed it back onto the table. She stared back at the pollen collectors one last time and when she finally looked up at her father he wasn’t prepared for the question she was about to ask.

"Why can’t people be more like the creatures in nature?"

Without waiting for a reply she reached over and pulled the Comic Section from the pile on the table and eased back into her chair. It was a tactic he had seen her resort to many times when Gina needed a break from her more earnest contemplations, a momentary reprieve that allowed her to metaphorically cool down the thinking process after running her mind at faster speeds. Though this was hardly uncommon for bright children or for that matter most adults, including himself, while silently watching her re-read the comics her cooling down process filled him with a tender fatherly ambivalence.

As she matured he tried to maintain a balance between being a protective father, a desire to encourage her yearning for knowledge and a wish to instill in her a non discouraging philological understanding of life in general, especially towards circumstances beyond their control.

The question itself was a fair one, a question he could supply a response to on many levels. The problem was how to articulate the answer in a way she could analyze and accept. What could he say to her? That some have been wondering the same thing for centuries? That some believe it’s their religiously or politically dictated destiny to subjugate the majority? That a genetic, overly obsessive greed mutation gene seems to have created a subspecies, an aberration that compels those inflicted to amass grotesque fortunes while readily languishing moral integrity? That having fifty million or a billion dollars is never enough to these types? That willingly forsaking their own conscience and selling their soul justified immoral and often illegal wealth gained through the suffering of the many?

"Perhaps it’s because the Creator, after spending a million millenniums of evolutionary time to perfect flawlessly specialized creatures in nature, either got bored or developed a weird sense of humor and made humans inhumanly flawed?" was the reply he finally settled on.

Gina looked up at her father with a shy grim and an expression that suggested she acknowledged and semi-embraced his explanation, at lease temporary. When he handed her half of the Travel Section she nodded her head knowingly, as if they had their own unspoken language. Though they weren’t taking a physical trip anytime soon both of their minds deserved a short imagination vacation.