72 Micro-Seasons, Many Bees, and My Romper Room Debacle.

How nature invented poetry.

I have been wandering around in my garden in a stupor, drunk on saturated colors and  bees humming and sunlight slanting and the afternoon sea breeze that’s come up our hollow from the cove from the pond from the ocean to quell the heat.

It is better than wandering the streets of Edgartown soaking wet, as I was on Tuesday. Well, not really wandering. I think they call it marching. I was walking behind the vintage red Vineyard Gazette Chevy truck tossing out newspaper hats to parade watchers, who seemed undaunted by the downpour (downpours). Granted, they had umbrellas and front porches and cocktails. Some of my colleagues donned trashbags as raincoats but I gave up on mine after a while. Wet skirt, wet shirt, wet clogs, wet hair, water running into my eyes. Stepping over oxen poop and wet lollipops - fun!

You can see why I’m out here in the garden, mesmerized by flower petals posing as pinwheels and pom-poms. I have been trying to count the bees on the lavender but they will not stay still long enough, bopping from one tiny tubular blossom to the next as they do.

Apropos of nothing and everything, this makes me think of the television show, Romper Room, which I was on for a few days in 1966. I very nearly got thrown off because I wouldn’t sit still at the little tables in front of the cameras and behave like the other kids. Why then was the bumble bee the show’s mascot? Bumble bees are always buzzing around! I just listened to the creepy theme song to the show, “Be a Good Do-Bee” and I now realize the whole point of the show was to get kids to behave like polite little mini-adults. I’ve said this before, but whoever thought it was a good idea for me to be on Romper Room was not in her right mind.

The really sad part is that the Metromedia Washington, D.C., Romper Room show, hosted by Miss Connie for 10 years, was cancelled in 1967 , and Miss Connie (Constance Anne Bohlin) died in 1972 at the age of 40 – from alcohol poisoning. It wasn’t my fault, though, I promise. I did eventually behave on the show – and get my Good Do-Bee certificate – after being bribed with ice cream. (Also now that I’m looking at the certificate, I’m realizing I was just shy of four years old - what did I know?)

Putting Romper Room out of my mind, I have a much more pleasant thought about the sudden upswing in garden bees.

I’ve recently learned that there is a traditional Japanese solar-lunar calendar with 72 micro-seasons, each about five days long. Each micro-season has a descriptive name; any handful of them thrown together makes a poem.

Warm winds blow

Evening cicadas sing

Hawks learn to fly

Dew glistens white on grass

Wagtails sing

Swallows leave

Thunder ceases

These are so beautiful, and I love the idea of there being a new season about every five days. It makes perfect sense to me, though the summer micro-seasons seem more the length of a nanosecond, while winter lumbers along with a week of skies-clouding-over, another two weeks of skies-turning-battleship-grey, another three weeks of skies-the-color-of-turnips, followed by a month of sunset-coming-at-4 p.m.

But June? July? August? Every day I notice something new.

Wild blueberries ripen

Yarrow is knee-high

Birdsong quickens at sunrise

Roadside daisies bloom

Hummingbirds rocket 

Bees buzz, gather, flit

Raspberry canes leaf out

Rabbits browse at twilight

Mushrooms sprout overnight

Rainy season wanes

Dry dirt crumbles

Sunflowers turn to the sun

Tomatoes fatten

Peppers ripen

Beetles feast

Dragonflies soar

Goldenrod flowers 

Crimson sumac sways

It would not be hard to think of something different I’ve noticed every day out in the garden, especially with all the flowers I have planted, both annual and perennial – dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, roses, feverfew, snapdragons, geum, marigolds, roses, false queen anne’s lace, salvia, phlox, sedum, daisies, catmint, pinks, lavender, helenium, narrowleaf sunflower, coneflower, daylilies, bupleurum, calendula, nasturtium, veronica, verbena, tickseed. Each day one buds or blooms, drop its petals, forms a seedhead, succumbs to bugs, collapses under a rainshower, or turns to the sunlight.

And the flora and fauna on our walks change daily. Thursday evening while we were on the bike path I noticed so many huckleberries and wild blueberries already ripe – and by some miracle uneaten by the birds – that I returned with a bowl and collected as many as I could.

Dinner was a little late as a result of my eager foraging. That is just par for the course this week. I can’t seem to drag myself inside.

I’ve written before about lollygagging, and I’ve made no secret of preferring to be outdoors than in, but most days I am able to tether myself to my desk, whether at home or at the office, and buckle down to get my work done. I don’t have a lot of choice there, as I have physical deadlines that must be met.

But this week I felt a great need to linger outside — to deadhead, weed, water, stake, harvest, forage – anything that looked vaguely urgent in the garden. Somehow, picking and arranging flowers — practicing making market bouquets — and harvesting berries fell into the urgent category. I seemed to desperately need the mental and physical escape.

I had a particularly difficult time sitting still at my desk. Oy! Visions of Romper Room. I realized why I was a camp counselor – outside all day long teaching sailing and herding kids in boats – every college summer rather than interning at a publishing company or some other respectable endeavor. I am relentlessly reminded of how much I am a creature of the outdoors. Of how soothing the fresh air is, how captivating the colors and shapes and smells are, how my endorphins rise, my anxiety ebbs, my creativity flows, and my muscles stretch.

In my next life, I might consider coming back as a bee. But that seems like a bad idea considering that worker bees live about two to three weeks – and even the Queen only lives about a year.

I think I will stay here in the land of the imperfect, where I must take the indoors with the out, the work with the play, the realities of unwelcome drama with the delight of welcome respites.

From Wordsworth, lines oddly stuck in my head since a seventh-grade memorization assignment:

 The world is too much with us, late and soon.

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in nature that is ours

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Wordsworth wrote this sonnet in the early 1800s in response to the first Industrial Revolution. A little scary, that. Some things never change.

I’m going to use the Japanese micro-seasons as my anchor to nature; each day or every few days I will note the movement of nature, the change in the stars or clouds, the branches or leaves, the hedges or thickets, the birds or the critters. Perhaps it will help me stay in my seat when I need to.

I hope it’s okay if I keep my boots on, though.