Hospice Care for a Bee

My students giving hospice care to a bee. 

For years I have compartmentalized my life into two sections, not including my motherhood. One is as an educator of young children and the other is that of a watercolor painter and poet. For more than a decade I wrote the blog The Moveable Alphabet: The Diary of a Montessori Theorist. I wrote much about the art done by students. Art was and remains a constant within the collective community we call a classroom. I am deeply passionate about sustaining an academic environment that simultaneously invites art and creative writing as a means of gaining and expressing knowledge and identity. 

Over the past few years, I have been writing this blog, A Sea of Watercolors: The Diary of a Watercolor Painter and Poet. I have mostly kept my life as an educator outside of its stories. I have occasionally sprinkled a small confetti of details here and there yet not the great beauty I find being in the presence of young children I call my students. 

I have thought much about this recently. My Monday through Friday walk alongside the young has inspired my poetry and artwork over the years. At times it echoes it. I will listen to students tell each other one thing or another and in this poetry of dialogue hear a ripple of shared insight within my own work. 

Here is one such moment:

I worked at my school's camp for a couple of weeks this summer. One day while out on the playground, I noticed several of my students huddled and looking concerned. I walked over to see what was happening. 

Before I got there I heard one student say, “There’s a vet by my house maybe they could help it.” But, what was “it”? I soon learned they were huddled over a bee with a broken wing. One of my elementary students was instructing the younger students on bee behavior and care. 

I decided to walk away and let them continue. A moment later, another of the students quickly ran up to me and said “The bee died, call the Queen,” those were their exact words. 

I returned to my huddled students. That guiding student said, “It’s not dead yet, but it’s turning its body left and right and wiggling. That’s their death dance. It’s what they do when they know they are dying and want to get back to their colony. So it’s not dead but it is dying.” 

A younger boy put his head down and began to weep. “It’s dying, Susan. It’s so sad,” they whispered. 

I suggested we pick some of the neighbor’s overhanging blueberries to make pillows for the bee, blueberry pillows. I gave the guiding student the berries. She formed an arc around the bee with them. 

Just as she was doing this the other teacher called out it was time to line up to go inside. The young girl look up at me and tenderly said, “I’ll need extra time to care for the bee as it’s not wiggling anymore. I want to be with it when it dies so it’s not alone.” 

When she rose to join the line, she had this quiet stillness even as she moved. As she walked forward with my other students, I thought to myself how grateful I am to be a teacher of young children. Too, I thought of the words of Christina Rossetti's poem:

Hurt No Living Thing

Hurt no living thing: 

Ladybird, nor butterfly, 

Nor moth with dusty wing, 

Nor cricket chirping cheerily, 

Nor grasshopper so light of leap, 

Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat, 

Nor harmless worms that creep. 

I shared my narrative of this hospice care for a bee on my social media but not here. Why? I have come to a place where I want to let go of dividing my experiences into boxes; this goes here and that goes there, don't let one spill into the other. I was sustaining a metaphorical file cabinet of my life. Yet, in truth, my teaching life and my creative life have always overlapped. They weave into a caterpillar braid as both are a part of me. 

I have hundreds of memories of children finding beauty in the smallest details of life and in its largest, from a solo student sitting in the corner drawing a detailed sketch of ants moving across the floor to others on the classroom rug collectively acting out thunder pounding overhead. In quiet times at home, I find myself swimming down a slow moving river of recalled moments, a mental slide show of my life in classrooms from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Nome, Alaska. 

The truth is that I strongly believed that keeping my elementary teaching experiences from this space was my way of sustaining a creative life outside the classroom which restored me and gave me the balance I need(ed) to return to it each day, each year. 

Yet, not sharing stanzas, tercets or sestets, from my teaching day was also keeping me from writing more here. I was walking with tales within me not knowing where to carefully place them. An archivist in search of a repository to preserve the wool gathered stories of children. I will share them here going forward. 

Back to bees. After watching and listening to my students compassionately care for this single bee, I returned home and re-read the poem I wrote two years ago titled, Hospice Care for a Bee. A man named Brooke that I once dated while we were both living in what was formerly called Barrow, Alaska called me and told me about this bee they had found outside the library they were visiting and the care they gave it. I can hear them now summarizing their story with these five words - hospice care for a bee. 

I also remember asking them to repeat those words as I felt this creative awareness that a poem was already forming in my thoughts about it and all that he had shared. It was like being slightly intoxicated with a slurry of imagery, voice and the written word. It was Friday afternoon and I spent most of the weekend writing it. 

The only time, other than eating and such, that I stopped writing was to Google search how to spell siksik, also called parka squirrel, a tundra dwelling rodent which finds its home in northern Alaska. One ran right across my foot once when I was out picking blueberries. I finished the poem that Sunday morning. When I sent it to Brooke to read, he text me “Congrats on a great poem and a special nod for including a siksik!"

When I read it now, I both hear his voice and I see my students using blueberries as pillows to comfort a dying bee on a hot summer day. A contemplative mediation, Lectio Divina, on kindness for all living things.  

Here is my poem:

Hospice Care for a Bee

He said 

into the phone,

“There are bees

in the Arctic,” 

a place familiar 

to both of us.

He added

that once 

he followed 

a velvet-clothed

bumble bee 

through a 

white clover-

covered field 

in Kotzebue.

He walked 

a yardstick 

or two 

behind the 

Arctic bee,

Bombus polaris,

as it zig-zagged

across the 

permafrost-

laced landscape

and then 

dipped down

below moss

and lichen,

entering a hole 

in the earth

where a lemming

or siksik had

sheltered the

winter before.

As I listened,

I saw him

walking his 

long-leg lengths 

across the

flower-flecked tundra.

I smelled the clover.

I saw the bumblebee.

I felt the warmth of a hand

I had often held. 

Memories of place 

and intimacy 

choreographed 

by the flight 

of a single

bumblebee.

Years later, 

thousands of miles

from the Kotzebue

clover-covered field,

leaving the library of 

a southern state,

he spied a fallen, 

curled bee

on a summer-hot,

cement sidewalk.

He slid beneath the bee

paper fetched 

from his pocket

and carried it 

to a close by 

petaled garden.

In the petals

of a bi-colored 

coleus plant

he placed

the silent bee

to later wake,

or find final 

comfort in 

its small

double-lipped,

blue flowers,

ones it may have 

gained pollen from

on another day.

He said 

into the phone,

“Hospice care 

for a bee.” 

Let me 

wrap myself

in velvet both

yellow and black,

and dust my form

with pollen’s gold 

to see if

he’d follow me 

across a flowered

Arctic field, or 

what tender care

he’d offer if

I was felled

from sky to earth.

If not,

unfurled 

from pollen-

dusted velvet,

I’ll gather 

flowers from

said field and

earth and

draw the 

bumblebee

to me.  

_____

syd ©

⚓