The Flower Sleepers

Val McGovern is a former high school educator, dog trainer, and NYS licensed veterinary technician. She is a member of the Long Island Writers’ Guild and the Freeport Memorial Library Memoir Writing Group coupled with a background in biology and an intense curiosity in the natural world. She resides in her canal-side apartment located in Freeport, NY where her observations of the natural world continue to inspire her writing. She keeps good company with the spirits of her three cats, Darla, Cleo, and Miss Penny and the myriad pollinators that hover in her native garden.

Bumble Bee On New England Aster

My days tend to rush by in a swirl of responsibilities and commitments. My nights, though, tend to elongate themselves, limbs reaching deep into a dank basement uprooting a copse of fears. I close my eyes. Shunning the cold shoulder of the night I fold into an origami. Crimp into something unrecognizable. Squeezing myself between pleats I snuggle within these petals of safety until the glare of daylight smooths me like a hot iron and I drift to the winds of my intuition floating on the thermal of a rare nothing to do day until I land on a mural I have yet to paint. 

It is October. The breath of my intuition warms the morning with a sashay of her hips and undulations of her body. Belly loose, shoulders swaying like a rocking chair, I am lulled outside into my little patch of paradise. Shaped like a crescent moon the garden curls around the corner of my apartment, merging the sky with the earth and all that pulsates in between. The bee balm, milkweeds, swamp and butterfly, false sunflowers, asters and wild indigo shimmer like a spectrum of stars; reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and violets, and the flowerheads of goldenrod burn like clusters of comets as they whizz by the tip of the moon and lose themselves within the spirals of  the milky way.

Bumble Bee on False Sunflower (H. Helianthoides)

My wind stalls. I sink into the doldrum’s sigh, feeling craters, cool and stony, beneath my body. The long sizzling fingers of the sun’s flares incinerate the night’s posturing before striking a match along the garden’s crescent. The blaze illuminates the aster. There is something in there, in the aster. Things. Dark rounded curled clinging. Bees. Bumbles. Could they be sleeping? Do bees sleep? They clasped the aster’s purple petals, bees like black buttons, shutting out the cool air. A gale of wind, Go See! Go See! blows me toward the aster in a bluster of insistence. Sidling up to the nectaries, the bees are nestled under petals, slumbering within a space degrees warmer than their surroundings. Mostly males, they are homeless, and cluster within and around blossoms to “shun the cold shoulder of the night.” 

I watch. The sun dazzles. The bees awaken, washing yellow stardust off themselves with dew, legs moving, bodies wiggling waggling wings buzzing, and I inhale the sweet body odor of aster, hear the whirr of wings, and feel the fuzz of one languishing bee as I stroked his body with my fingertip. Climbing the aster’s herbaceous spires the bees burst like sparks into their morning of “everything to do'' and begin the day’s labor of searching for gynes, unfertilized female bees to perpetuate the next generations of pollinators for the production of crops; berries, melons, squash, peppers, and wildflower seeds that will sustain a multitude of birds, such as goldfinches, chickadees, siskins, and sparrows through harsh winters, as well as generate wildflower offspring that offer enticing “come hither” blooms burgeoning with pollen and nectar for butterflies and moths as well as nourishment, nooks, and crannies for their caterpillars, cocoons, and chrysalises. The bees buzz about. Flick their long tongues like darts into nectaries. Embellish themselves with pollen grains liberated from the flower’s anthers and filled with sperm. I squat within the tall bodies of the asters, cradled within the curved space between earth and sky. The flutter of wonder grazes my heart and I know I am alive. 

Bee enjoying Goldenrods

Since that October day, in 2019, I have continued to cultivate a native plant garden filled with species indigenous to NYS. A tangle of untamed, unruly, specimens, they surprise me with their unpredictability as they open their homes to the native bees, offering them food, shelter, and a place to close their eyes, two compound and three ocelli (do they close their eyes?) and sleep. I share my experiences with others who’ll listen, tilling their imagination, turning over stale beliefs, readying them for the possibility of their own patch of paradise; a smudge of earth perfumed in nature’s scents instead of pesticides and donned in the spirited colors and flora like the flowing scarves of the non-conformist dancer and libertine Isadora Duncan, rather than the monotony of a well-manicured lawn. A good friend is now in the process of creating her own native garden and she, too, has stories to tell. About the eastern black swallowtail caterpillar hammocking itself to the rigid stem of goldenrod before transforming into a chrysalis, the unabashed lovers tryst between the orange and black milkweed beetles on the slope of a butterfly weed, or the trembling of marsh mallow blossom as a carpenter bee creates floral buzz and shakes down the flower’s anthers for pollen. 

The bumble bees continue to visit my garden and sleep, sometimes curled together within or under blossoms, asters, spotted bee balm, and wild bergamot. The temperature is sinking into fall now, and the aged queens will die passing their wisdom, like crones, to those bees newly coronated and destined for next season’s sequel. They will soon search for a space to slumber within an abandoned rodent hole or other pouch of ground. In recent years, different species of bees and wasps have arrived in the company of pollinator flies and moths, and others I have yet to identify. Together With the longhorn, sweat, and leaf cutter bees and the syrphid flies and flower moths, they quench their thirst for nectar on the asters and goldenrods, those late bloomers burgeoning with sustenance. And when the sun strikes her match along the curve of the crescent moon once again, the goldenrod lights up like a sparkler, the flowerheads a cache of comets whizzing by the tip of the moon, seeding galaxies with stars and new constellations of hope.