Somewhere, lost to the years, is another one of Newton’s laws of motion. Time accelerates exponentially with each of life’s milestones passed. This weekend was my 40th year high school class reunion. I wasn’t able to attend but looking at the photographs online was sobering.
Forty years.
It seems like yesterday that we sat on our school’s football field in cap and gown, then walked across the stage to get a piece of paper that read, “Welcome to adulthood, where time just goes faster and faster.” And yet it was also a lifetime ago. I hardly know the girl I was back then. What were her dreams? Would she ever have imagined her life as it is now? Where did the years go?
I was one of the first in my class to get married, which means my 40th year wedding anniversary is also fast approaching. We are celebrating our anniversary by visiting our young adult son who recently flew the nest and moved to Wisconsin. Another milestone passed, time speeds up even more.
How is it mid-October already? I recently decided to tackle the leaning tower of papers and books that had been growing on our kitchen table. That one must fall under Newton’s first law of motion: A stack of clutter will remain cluttered until acted upon by either person or gravity or random bumps and jostles to said table.
I felt like an archeologist, unearthing my year. Midway down, I found my 2026 calendar, still opened to April. Further down I found the ADHD planner I bought – checks records – on December 28th of last year. Yes, I have yet to use it. Yes, ADHD may be part of the reason. High hopes. Too scattered.
Falling and whirling, and fluttering down,
Beautiful leaves, all crisp and brown;
Decking the grave where the Summer lies,
Under the grey of the Autumn skies…
~ Lizzie Marshall Berry
Do you remember those school assignments from yesteryear? How I spent my summer vacation… “This summer, I took way too many photographs of bees and their butts.”
In August, I fell head over heels in love with iNaturalist and have finally started a longtime goal of photographing pollinators in my garden. ie: I have taken so many photographs of bees and their butts!
Worldwide, insect populations are struggling due to climate change, habitat destruction and widespread pesticide use. In Texas, three bumblebees have been identified as a “greatest conservation need,” meaning that their populations are facing a significant decline. This summer, I documented two of them in my garden – the American bumblebee and the Sonoran bumblebee. Bumblebees live in colonies, though, and I never saw more than one or two in my garden on any given day and sometimes days would go by without a single sighting. Is that why my tomatoes and squash struggled to set fruit this year? Will I need to hand pollinate my vegetable plants next year? Will my ADHD brain be able to take on that task?
The past few years, I have vowed to keep my garden paths cleared. The past few years, I have failed at that goal. The salvia coccinea that reseeds far and wide throughout my garden love to sprout up in my pathways and push out from the flower beds. This morning – bright blue sky, crisp autumn air – the salvias are abuzz with Western honey bees. While Texas has more than 1,000 native bees, this is not one of them. This honey bee was brought here by Europeans and now is the dominant bee in my garden. On any given day, I have a dozen or more of them buzzing about. I recently pulled “Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide To North America’s Bees And Butterflies” off of my bookshelf and hope to get it read sometime soon, in hopes that I can find some bits of wisdom to incorporate in to my garden. A garden is ever evolving, much as the gardener. It is never too late to pivot or to learn something new. Life is one glorious journey, full of opportunities. “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life,” the poet Mary Oliver asked. I intend to make my life more wild…
…I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Photographs were taken at the Flower Mound Town Hall’s Monarch Waystation garden on Sunday, October 18th, 2026.)
