the birds and the bees 87Alexandria library. Anne sounded unfazed on the morning she called to
say, “You’d better come get this one, it’s making a pretty good racket.”
Maybe in places like Hollywood, California, postal clerks would be
uneasy about weighing packages and selling stamps while twenty- eight
baby chickens peeped loudly into their right ear and four crates of angry
insects buzzed in their left. Not here. They all just grinned when Lily and
I came in. The insects weren’t ours, but Anne invited Lily to check them
out anyway. “Come on back behind the counter, hon, take a look at these
bees. They’ve got honey dripping out already.”
Bees? Ho-hum, just an ordinary day at our P.O. I adjusted my notion of
myself as a special- needs postal customer.
Lily bent over the bee cages, peering at the trembling masses of worker
bees humming against the wire mesh sides of the boxes. The sticky sub-
stance dripping out was actually sugar water sent along to sustain the
bees through their journey. Down below the buzzing clots of worker bees
sat the queen bees with their enormous hind ends, each carefully en-
capsulated in her own special chamber. These big- bootied ladies were
replacement queens ordered by local beekeepers from a bee supply com-
pany, to jump- start hives whose previous queens were dead or otherwise
inadequate.
But Lily quickly turned to the box with her name on it: a small card-
board mailing crate with dime- sized holes on all sides and twenty- eight
loud voices inside: the noise- density quotient of one kindergarten packed
into a shoebox. Lily picked it up and started crooning like a new mother.
This was the beginning of a fl ock she’d been planning for many months
and will be tending, I presume, until we see her off to college. Because
we knew the chicks were coming this morning, I had allowed her to stay
home from school to wait for the call. She wasn’t sure the principal would
consider this an excused absence. I assured her it was a responsibility
large enough to justify a few hours of missed class. I hadn’t even known
we’d be having lessons in the birds and the bees.
Once she’d brought them home, taken her twenty- eight chicks out of
that tiny box, and started each one on its path to a new life under her care,
Lily was ready to get back to third grade. When we signed her in at the
principal’s office, the secretary needed a reason for Lily’s tardiness. Lily