My thumb hurts this morning. I got into a fight yesterday. I honestly thought that my days of getting into fights were long ago. And just like the old days, I was not looking to involve myself in a tussle. I just wanted a flower petal for a snack.

Okay, so this may require some explanation but probably not too much. I’ve become a grazer. This doesn’t mean that I graze my refrigerator in my apartment in town. It means, we are in the season when human food is available in the boxes and where God has provided a few things that are not so terrible to nibble on as well.

Okay, maybe this next item is a little iffy as well. But I have poppies. I didn’t plant them. The previous owner thought it was nice to have them out in front of the house. Did she believe in them as a medicinal or did she just like perennial flowers around the house that she could count on to bloom beautifully at certain times of the year. Either way, it’s kind of a gift to have puppies laying around and last year I chose not to harvest them at all and let them do what they want to do and this year we have lots of poppies.

I guess this is the technical data that opium is derived from poppy seeds. It is also a well-known village medicinal herb that people Brew tea from poppy seeds for the medicinal effect of adding this pain killing opiate to their diet. It is possible that I am aware of this and that this is part of my pleasure in nibbling on the fragile Orange poppy leaves. They don’t taste bad, they are like a more delicious than normal form of lettuce and if there is a medicinal effect in there, well, thank you God for poppies.

As you can see though, I’m treading on perilous ground. You can see that this is a dangerous place to be discussing. And me? What a fool I am almost universally at my seemingly unquenchable need to put myself In harm’s way.

To pack one more thing into this little thought suitcase, I am beginning to believe or partially believe that nature has a way of telling us what to do all by itself. These mosquitoes for example. At the time the mosquitoes come to feed on us it is exactly the time that all the insects come to feed and if you wish to protect certain plants from being eaten by voracious bands of newly hatched insect life, the violence the mosquitoes bring becomes very useful in your hunt.

At the same time, the color orange appears with a natural painkiller. Do those two things go together? Apparently yes.

But puppies are dangerous because of their medicinal qualities and getting their hands on some poppy nectar will drive the bees to insanity.

I didn’t notice that he was in there. It’s a he. And even if I did notice, I do not have a great deal of fear for bees because I do not use sugar regularly. I do not bake with it or cook with it so there is really no reason for bees to come to my house. I do have some plants in the window and sometimes the bees get stuck in the window because they can’t figure out how to leave. Perhaps in the future I will work on a hinge for the window which will help. But in the meantime, I have no truck with bees and they do not seem to have a problem with me.

Okay. There is one more thing. I did get really frustrated at the bees buzzing around my kitchen window that doesn’t have a hinge to let them out and in a moment of frustration of trying to quietly brush them out, I picked up a torch and killed several of them just to stop the incessant hysterical buzzing. A day or two later, a b flew into my house through the back window while I was resting on the couch. The be discussed my actions with me and why I believed I needed this act of terrorism. My only explanation was that I was human and that killing is a part of my DNA. We also discussed my social position as alpha and that I tried to be fair with how much I allow for nature and how much I take for myself but I must live, as all living things do.

I was forgiven because of the impossibility of imparting punishment. And we have since had a less easy partnership. The beauty of watching the bees dance is less because in a moment of frustration I murdered several of them for disturbing my peace.

So I was reaching for a poppy petal and found myself getting shived buying outrageously hysterical young man trying to live for his queen. Or God. Nature. Himself. And In This moment he quite clearly told me to get my hands off of the poppy flowers.

Sometimes size can be deceiving. He’s just a little bugger. I could kill him a million times before he could ever kill me. It’s not even a fight. But he got me good. I can still feel it and I can still see him knifing away like a savage telling me to get off of his property. He was probably right.