What I do know, is that the bees need food!  They have to do a lot of work.  Imagine how tired they get working as hard as they do?

Here is my simple sunny solution, and even kids could get involved.  Planting cornflowers is easy!  The seed package costs very little and you can save your seeds, too.  Give some to friends!

What if, across the world, or even the US we had little bee gardens!

If you could see the number of bees all over these cornflowers dancing in the sun and gathering pollen — ?

You’d know you were making a good contribution!

Let me show you my pictures from yesterday…

Here is the flower of the classic “Bachelor Button” or “Cornflower”  or “Cyanus Centaurea” — a beautiful blue fllwer and very easy to grow.  You can even do them in a large pot on your patio?  I have done that before.

The blue makes an incredible addition to the garden.

Here the bee is coming in for a landing!  Wait til you see the pollen!

Here the bee is gathering food!  See the pollen on his back legs?  That is what makes honey, which the bee needs to survive.  In the old days, and especially classical gardeners in England — the farmer would consult with the bees before making decisions!  Bee die off alerts all farmers to the problem.  Nobody asked the bees.

Bees pollinate everything we eat as humans.  They are so important, and we can’t lose them!

Seeing all the pollen on the bees legs made me know that the cornflowers were a good food source for them!

Yesterday I watched them tumble and tumble all over the cornflowers, almost fighting each other to land, but not really!  There are enough flowers for everyone!

Now, the bee takes off!

Back to the hive!

The honey and wax support the colony, and in turn the colony supports pollination of things that humans like to eat!

That little bee will be working all day, back and forth and back and forth!

This is how the flower looks when the bees have finished and the pollen is gone!  It has closed in upon itself, and the seeds are forming inside!  You can tell by how fat it is!

One of the flowers that is full of seeds!

As gardeners we would pluck that off?

We call that “deadheading” because we want more flowers — but?  You can save that!

Inside that flower will be dozens of seeds!

You could share them with another gardener?

Teach somebody how to grow this very simple flower?

Help to feed a bee colony!

And have the prettiest bouquet ever!

xxoo!

from Adrienne

The Beautiful Kind

By Valentine Bonnaire c. May 2013 valentine@valentinebonnaire.com

He was still all of that, and so was I and we both knew it as we ran into each other again after years in the kind of town that we live in.  You can go for years here without bumping into people you knew from the years you were in school.

He’d become an urchin diver.  He’d lost half a finger.  He held his golden finger toward me and I took it in my hands.  “I’m pickled in brine.”

“You look fantastic,” I said.

He did.  He hadn’t lost any of his sun rays.  We both had glasses on, dark the way we shield ourselves from too many eyes.  From the kind of eyes that are always staring.

“Didn’t you like me?”

“Do you remember what you used to call me?”

“No.”

“Hot lips.”

“Didn’t you like me?”

“I did.”

“We had this class together called Vocabulary.”

“Remember that guy Stefanopolus who was the teacher?”

“Yeah.”

“He died.”

“He did?”

“The dude was gay.”

“Was he?”

It was hard for me to take my eyes off his face because he was so handsome and that’s what I look for first.  The hands come after.  I dropped his suddenly.

“How’d that happen?”

“Off that old pier by the Biltmore right after High School.”

“Really?”

“Yeah I was diving.  Accident.”

“I learned how to smoke on that pier.”

“Too bad they tore it down.”

We were standing there and suddenly my husband came around the corner with the dogs.  “This is an old friend,” I said.  They shook hands.  We made small talk, in the way that people who live here make small talk about weather.

“Great to see you,” I said as we moved off, the way that married couples move off and there is a silence in that space where so many thoughts are running through each other’s mind about whole areas of life that you can never know.  Like, how much I had really liked him once upon a time in the years I got my first lipsticks.  In the years that every time he saw me he’d say “Hot lips,” and I’d get so embarrassed I wanted to flee, anyplace — just flee.  Because I liked him back.

The town is small.  Very small.  So small that the following week we ran into each other again down on the breakwater and he was with his wife.  My husband and I had the dogs with us all flashing fur and tumble pulling at the leads and I thought to myself, *Oh god, you married that.*

The thing is?  I knew that he thought the exact same thing about me.  So there we were, staring at each other and thinking about an entire alternate history that might have unfolded between the two of us had we made a different choice at the kind of crossroads life continually throws at everybody.  That’s why he’d asked me, “Didn’t you like me?”

She was a short woman, and she was incredibly heavy in the way that pear-shaped women get.  I could see the size of her in those baggy pants she was wearing — three women could have fit in those pants.  She’d borne him a couple of sons, and she’d backed him in all his endeavors and they’d been together for ages it looked like, at least from behind.  It was hard for me to imagine them in bed together.  They probably didn’t anymore, because that’s what happens.  Somehow, I couldn’t see it.  He still looked just like he had in school, still had that tanned glow and the boyish smile and the wicked glint in his eye.  What neither of our spouses knew in that moment was that, yes, there was still something there — the kind of thing that never changes when there is that electric charge between two people.  I would have fucked his brains out, because I was older now.  And he was staring at me like he would have wanted that too.  If there had been a chance?  We would have done that.

He was trimming the hedge down the street when I saw him again, because now we lived on the same street as each other and circumstance had thrust us near, in the way that circumstance or karma can thrust two people.  He’s not home much.  He’s out on the sea far away from her.  I think he might come home every couple of months.  I stopped my car, because I saw him.  All that tan goldenness standing there trimming and he must have been doing that all day long because the pile of the greens was tremendous and I said, “Oh, are you living up here now?” and he said, “Yes.”  It was the house he grew up in.

We stood there together for a long time on the street, just talking.  I’m not sure how you are supposed to make small talk when that electric current is still a thing that surges, because it was, and you edge around things about each other carefully, gathering details, the kind of details you don’t really want to know, not really, because you liked each other once.

“I was so shy,” I said.  “You were so handsome.”

“I’m away a lot.”

“I’m a writer now.”

“We sure lived in strange times.”

“Yeah.”

“Stefanopolus died.”

“Funny how we took that class.  All those words.”

“I traveled after.”

“You did?”

“Around the world.”

“Oh.  I moved to Hollywood for awhile, with my first boyfriend.”

This is what I know, now.  There are no guarantees.  I wonder what it would have been like to have chosen somebody like him instead of what happened.  Instead of guy number one and guy number two and guy number three and guy number four and guy number five and guy number six and guy number seven and guy number eight and guy number nine and guy number ten and I could go on but why?

“You’ll always look like that,” my husband says.

“You’ll always be handsome, just like you were then,” I said to him.  Standing sweaty in the long green vines as he clipped them.

“Why didn’t you like me?” he asked again.

“I did,” I said slowly, taking in his golden tan, the halved finger, the life spent in brine, the life spent offshore and under the sea picking the spiny purple urchins up.

“I liked older men, then.”

After I said it, I wished I could have retracted it.  I wish I’d had the courage to be somebody like her, to be really in love, to bear children and make a history and have fat, fat hips covered in her kind of cellulite sitting at home waiting for her man to get back except I’m not that kind.  I’m the kind who had a copy of Plath’s poems in my purse way back when we sat in that class so long ago together and there was this darkness I never wanted to fall into that belonged to Sylvias.

“Why didn’t you let me fuck you?”

I knew that’s what he was trying to say to me.  They all do.

~
END

I wrote this for my friend Remittance Girl because of something she wrote.  Read this.  Our truths are only beginning to be unpacked in the generation of women who lived Post-Plath.  Here is the link to “Separate States”
xxoo!

what I was listening to — “Time in a Bottle”

I just did, from P. Allen Smith — all because of FB!

It’s this one…

I love, love, love old roses.  The first ones I ever planted were the David Austins.

Can’t wait to get my prize.  And I love what P. Allen Smith does as a gardener, and for his state.  It’s great to see that.

So unlike the men of California.

xxoo!

Adrienne

You have.

My writing was up for something called a Golden Clitorides award once.  Cool huh?

It is.  Literary Erotica isn’t crummy. It’s for an educated reader who can sort through metaphor and poesis.  It’s for the reader who would never watch porn.  It’s for the connoisseur.  Is that you?

Literary Erotica can excite you, teach you, inform you.  I saw a tweet about Christians and Porn.  Well?  Literary Erotica is NOT PORN and it is NOT SMUT.

Literary Erotica is about relationships.  In my case I write heterosexual, and what is called “Vanilla” style. I’m pretty much the only person who is writing that and technically I don’t write any BDSM.  I did one piece like that just to see how it went over on my writer’s list at ERWA.  People write m/m which means male/male or f/f which means female/female or BDSM ala 50Shades only moreso.  So?  I’m your vanilla source, and I like that.

xxoo!

Adrienne

http://about.me/valentine_bonnaire

Go see!

You can read me in the story galleries over at ERWA — just google that.

You can buy me!  You won’t regret it.

You can contact me if you need a custom story because you are worried about something as regards your love life or lack thereof.

I write with the top writers.  Click the book to read an excerpt and see the stories listed.

Nobody in America is going to give a shit about a film like this.  But over in England they will.  So I just took a really big chance on the actor Jeremy Irons.  I sent him my links in FACEBOOK.  Including all my dumb little youtube films I made about it.  Do you know what it’s like to be an American without a voice?  An American with a GRADUATE DEGREE?

An AMERICAN THE SYSTEM FAILED.

Where is the HOPE?

My  hope is this book, and with the right BRANDING it’ll be a go.  I feel that.  There haven’t been any fucking heart-centered films coming out of Hollywood in how long?

I sent it to a literary agent at the writer’s conference I go to.  He said it was too sweet and lovely for this marketplace.  Oh well.

You are looking at my graduate degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute in this book I wrote.

My degree mattered to me once.

Thank god for guys like Mark Coker.

You can read it in Scribd.com and Wattpad but?  I’m putting it in SMASHWORDS.  I was hoping if I wrote Literary Erotica I could make the money to produce the film myself.

Everybody in America is a whore under the fascist system, right?

In Britain it’s not like that.  For one thing, they are smarter — especially on FILM.

HERE:

The writer

I’ve only been published at the very best places in the web.  I like the control of choosing my covers and designing them.  And, they look good over in Smashwords and for Kobo and Nook.  So far, I only put one up for sale.  Over at ERWA I know I’m being read by the Library Journal, which is good.  The last two stories I sent to anthologies were rejected by the editors.  Not a problem.  I have other editors who like my work.  I think it’s a much better deal in this genre to self-publish.

Who wrote like I did in the past?  Anais Nin.  She was paid $1.00 a page.  From me?  You will get the whole story.  I’m tired of working and writing for free!

Look how clean this cover design is?  I like the control.

xxoo!

from me

about.me & the trust cloud.

go see that here.

Looks pretty, on a rainy fogged in day like today!

Yay!

who knows how that happened but it’s like the lucky fabness of WordPress in general.

On an aside — one year at the paper I wrote an editorial — for years I wanted to be a writer there — anyway, the editorial was about this protest that happened because of a big box store being built here — there was a little band of people talking about the rainforest woods this place used and sold?

Well I wrote it for the paper and it was going to run until that smarmy ass of a publisher pulled it — because the company advertised in the paper.

Can you believe that?

Well.  That really happened.  WordPress has given me so much creative freedom, you know — BLESS YOU!

xxoo!

from Adrienne

In a way I really feel like laughing at what I saw, but I need to sell a few books so, I better get back to writing, but gee, WP.  Thank you!