C. Jenny Walbridge
January 4, 2022
My Method
Mentally
IL
Good Neighbor Posse
Clutterbusting Team
meets
Interior Decoration!
Meanwhile, This Wild, Sweet Person Loves Bees!
Bees, fruitful,
multiplied by
devoted framers,
constitutional
lawn-paintings of
swords into snowblowers!
Save Us—We Be!
Wee bees, needy sweeties
Love um
House em
Home um
Tree honey Forest money Selling candy Capitalist fantasy
Roamin’ buzzin’ flyin’ homin’
Insex: we love like em
Help! Care for our buddies, our workers, our Queens!
The future rides upon bees’ wings—Yikes!
The website leasehoney.com states: “Bees pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons, almonds, and broccoli. Fruits like blueberries and cherries are 90% dependent on honey bee pollination, and during bloom time, almonds depend entirely on honey bees for pollination.
“The fruits and vegetables you eat on a daily basis are also made possibly by honey bee pollination, including but not limited to watermelons, pumpkins, squashes, zucchinis, lentils, tomatoes, strawberries, mangos, avocados, plums, peaches, apricots, pomegranates, pears, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, peanuts, macadamia nuts, mustard seeds, coconuts, soybeans, and coffee.”
treehugger.com states of bees that “Their work means that coffee plants produce 20-25 percent more fruit. That extra production can mean the difference between a small farmer making enough profit to support his family and his family not being able to eat. And because about 80 percent of the coffee we drink is grown by people running small coffee-growing businesses, keeping bee populations healthy matters to both producer and consumer.” This from “How Bees, Coffee and Climate Change Are Inextricably Linked,” by Starre Vartan.
This makes me think of a few things. Firstly, doesn’t the Bible have God giving Nature to humans to tend like a garden? To rape, plantation style, including slave labor? No, that’s not what it says.
I came from a place transitioning from rural to suburb—Libertyville, Illinois, an hour by train from Chicago. Our hundred acres were planted with various and sundry fruits, nuts, vegetables and crops. We had a large grass lawn, but there was a wild field (“the pig lot”) and there were wild spaces, nurturing rabbits, groundhogs, opossums, raccoons, the crayfish that lived in the basement, etc. I only got stung once by a bee or a wasp—I had put my hand into a pile of cut grass, its temporary home, so was not resentful.
Point being, I know how rich complexity can be, and how much work it is to tend a garden. But I also feel how deadly an environment can be when reduced to simplicity; just like racial composition for humans, communities need to be integrated. A natural environment is often composed of many families (insect and human; dandelion and oak; bird of many feathers, including raptors, and small mammals—overlapping in their life cycles), but when reduced to the simplicity of one species caring so much to win against nature that it will poison its own countrymen, the pickers of the food crops, with insecticides, even—get this—as it relies on insects to pollinate it, I worry. I feel in myself the sentiment that American poet Robert Frost relates in “Mending Wall,” “Something there is that does not love a wall.”( https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall )
My last name is Walbridge, and I hope I can live up to it! A fellow “Jen” of mine, Gen. Hiram Walbridge of New York, a congressman, in January 1865 gave a speech to his colleagues regarding slavery, and why it should be stopped—it was “on the proposed amendment to the federal Constitution forever prohibiting slavery in the United States: delivered before the Committee on Federal Relations, in the Assembly Chamber of New York”. He suggested that, odious as slavery has been perceived by Europeans, if the North of the USA didn’t get rid of it, maybe the South would first. It would be in their interest to then make commercial trading deals with other countries.
I don’t know about you, but I am an ape. I like to say that I’m a great ape, ha ha ha, and am similar to a bonobo. My friends, the African great apes—chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos—are under attack by this world, and this concerns me. “In recent history,” according to treehugger.com, “Can We Save Africa’s Great Apes?” by Mary JoDiLonardo, “we have seen significant declines in all great ape populations and their natural habitat…Habitat loss is caused by the extraction of natural resources through commercial logging, mining, conversion of forests to make way for large-scale agricultural plantations or other human development activities like roads and infrastructure, all of which encroach on great ape habitat.” The great apes are extremely cute when they are youngsters. Bonobos have amazing behavior patterns, see below. Plus, they have hair on their heads that is parted in the middle, like me. This is the amazing thing: when they are stressed out, they have sex. God made them! Do you think we should be learning here?