vacation, the birds and the bees

my yin and i have been in North Carolina for less than a week, and i have already felt the shift in my internal clock from South Florida to Blue Ridge Mountain time. i cannot understate the discrepancies between these two climates (both metaphorical and literal), but i think this photo taken yesterday might help:

bees having sex

bees would never do this in South Florida because it is way too hot. in fact, in spite of all the claims of "local honey," i have yet to see a single bee in the past four years. maybe i just don't go west far enough, or maybe they're special Florida insomniac bees that only come out in the middle of the night, or maybe they use artificial bee insemination – do bees even have semen?

this is definitely beside the point.

the point is that i don't have time to watch bees having sex in Florida, and this is one of the great hyperbolic tragedies of the past decade. we don't spend enough time learning from the birds and the bees and, as if to underscore this point, soon after watching the fornicating bees my yin and i heard a strange clicking noise coming from this animal:

bluebird in a tree

in spite of having grown up here, i had never heard a clicking bluebird before, and i still don't know if this behavior is normal or if it was some sort of strange Morse code, meant to alert us about impending fortune ahead.

thus far our vacation has been replete with such signs – bunnies, horses, cows, deer – and there is even a goat living below my father's house, whose former recalcitrant nature has been replaced by a profound contemplative solitude. his (or her) mate died some months ago, and (s)he has been moping around, munching grass without enthusiasm, and staying indoors for inordinate amounts of the day. i wonder what sadness it feels, and how it makes sense of a life upended without ritual, reason, or religion. how much do we rely upon these things to explain the things that can never be understood?

and now, a moment of silence for all the lonely goats in the world...