Like the poppies I met while walking the dog one day in a new neighborhood, a place that felt full of strangers until we turned the corner and found the sidewalk suddenly covered with flowers.
That was cool.
Not just because those red-orange poppies were beautiful, with black-yellow centers that made them look like a bumblebee was visiting them even when one wasn’t happily rolling in their pollen, but because they had been allowed to carpet the walkway, pushing through the cracked cement and crawling up the chain link fence to stand tall and strong anywhere they wanted.
So I knew those flowers were tended by someone like me, which was exactly what I need to find that morning.
“I know it looks disorganized,” said the man I met while he was outside watering those flowers a few days later. Sounded apologetic, as if expecting me to disapprove, he added: “But you gotta keep the bees happy, right?”
“Of course,” I said, and he smiled with relief when I added: “I don’t think it’s disorganized at all.”
To me, the sidewalk looked like love: Love for all the little things trying to survive in the world we paved, those scrappy creatures who can take any patch of dirt and sunshine we let them use and find a way to thrive.
So I loved meeting those flowers bursting through the concrete to show me I wasn’t alone. That not every human nearby coveted a trim lawn free of dandelions, and still saw water as something to keep their grass deep green and their cars squeaky clean.
Because the thing about those dandelions? They feed bees, and bees feed us by pollinating most of our crops. So that man using his water to help the bees is not only kind, but smart, knowing that we need bees a lot more than they need us.
And I certainly needed the bees that day, because watching happy bees makes me happy:
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