The post spread awareness of our bee decline, but it (incorrectly) suggested leaving a sugar solution out for them. “You don’t have to worry about me.Is sugar water bad for bees? Many of the reasons for the conflicting information on this is due to a viral fake news post, which was wrongly attributed to David Attenborough and taken down. “Mom,” I say, when she walks into the kitchen.
I’ve slayed the villain that was hiding inside me. I am an apple from only the best parts of the tree. Not a single bruise on any of the apples. I inspect each apple for bruises and blemishes. I will spend my life trying to keep him alive.” The white oak is Dad. Seven years of apples in a white oak bowl sitting on the kitchen countertop and I only, now, see why my mom puts them there.
Sad sugar story full#
In the kitchen I see the bowl full of apples, a white oak bowl full of red apples. I feel the strength in the old oak’s trunk.
I smell the vanilla in the old oak’s tree bark, the smell Dad taught me to notice. “Dad?” I smell decomposition and old blood. All the oak’s branches have turned toward the ground. I sit on a branch that spreads over the ground. I pick up my backpack and I follow the creek that leads to the oak tree in the yard, to the black scar on its trunk from where a thick limb once reached upward. I’m scared as if her thought is a premonition. I want to tell her not to worry about me, but I’m scared. I want to tell her that her burden makes me angry, that it crushes me, that it flattens me. “I will spend my life trying to keep him alive.” She means me. I want to tell Mom that I walk through the woods, but she worries. I should have made him not want to leave us. I am seven years too late to make him laugh, seven years too late to make him happier, seven years too late to give him reasons to stay. I am seven years too late for more knock, knock, jokes. Or because the corners of his mouth don’t go up into his cheeks in an easy way.
Maybe because his lips are dry and look a little too stretched over his teeth. Maybe because his smile looks a little like the same fake smile, I make in all my school pictures. But I see his sadness captured by the photograph. My mouth is open in the ready position to blow out six candles. In a birthday photo, we wear matching red hats on our heads, the paper cone kind with the elastic bands that dig under our chins. His eyes look sad even as his face smiles. I keep photographs of Dad in a tackle box. Mom said it, but I know Mom doesn’t feel that way. There was nothing you could do.” The therapist said it. How did I let my dad slip through my fingers? I reach to unhook him, but he slips through my fingers. With it being the end of the semester and the week before Thanksgiving, teachers don’t add to their piles of ungraded papers. My backpack is light, no books, not much homework. I’ve got a friend, Jimmy, who likes the smell of skunks. I didn’t know what a medical examiner did. I didn’t know what the smell was when I was a kid. I smell Dad, the amalgam of decomposition and old blood. I inhale the dank smell of cold dirt and dropped leaves. If I had only told Dad how much I needed him. “That villain convinced your father the world was better off without him.” “Depression is a villain,” the therapist said. I wonder, Dad, did it take courage to kill yourself? Did you care about leaving me? “Aspens are protectors and inspire courage.” Brave aspens.
“ Aspis means shield in Greek,” Dad said. I follow a line of golden, round-leaved aspens to the creek, a grove of clone trees grown from the root system of the male. I search the sugar maple for a perfect orange leaf - I think I’ll press the leaf between two sheets of waxed paper like I did when I was a kid – but I can’t find a perfect orange leaf. Did you know the oldest maple is five hundred years old? They call it the Comfort Tree. I love ‘em even more, now, Dad and trees. It was Dad that taught me to appreciate trees before he hung himself from one. A sixteen-year-old boy calling a sugar maple pretty. I like the wordlessness of the walk.Ī pretty sugar maple dressed in vivid orange frills beckons me off the path. Especially on autumn days, when the air is cool, and the flies and mosquitos are gone, and basketball practice hasn’t begun. She never picks me up from school, and two miles is too close for a bus pickup, which is fine by me because I like cutting through the woods. This story contains themes or mentions of suicide or self harm.
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