6
The Lesson of the Bumblebee

Cloverdale was having an Indian summer—unusually warm days. Today was Aaron Yoder’s birthday and he had brought in homemade soft pretzels as a treat. Salty pretzels. Under normal conditions, Lily would not accept anything from Aaron Yoder, but she had seen his mother deliver those pretzels, still warm, to Teacher Rhoda during first recess. Soft pretzels topped Lily’s list for favorite treats. She tried to save part of her pretzel for lunch but it was too delicious. It made her thirsty, too. In fact, all of the children were thirsty after the pretzels. They lined up for a turn at the water pump and drank and drank to their hearts’ content.

During lunch recess, Lily discovered a problem. A very, very serious problem. The girls’ bathroom was not working. A small sign taped up to the door read Out of Order. Lily and her friends discussed using the boys’ bathroom, but unanimously voted against it. Too many germs.

By the start of afternoon classes, Lily was in trouble. Just the sound of someone at the water pump made her remember how badly she needed to go to the girls’ room. It became a very stressful situation. She crossed her legs. She squeezed her hands. She couldn’t think of anything but getting to the bathroom. Fast.

It wasn’t until the second recess that Teacher Rhoda went out to use the bathroom and discovered the sign. She pulled it off the wall and went inside. Lily and her friends ran over to wait for her to come out. “We thought the bathroom was broken,” Lily said.

“Girls,” Teacher Rhoda said, “think about it. First, it was a note written in a boy’s handwriting. Second, what could possibly be out of order in an outhouse?”

Oh. Oh!

Out on the front porch, Papa dipped the little paintbrush into the jar of white paint. Now that Mama had finally chosen a name for the farmette, Papa was working on a sign. With careful, elegant strokes, he painted letters on the big green sign that sat on top of two wooden sawhorses. The sign would be posted at the end of their driveway. As he finished the letter N, Lily started to giggle. If Papa stopped now, the sign would read Whispering Pin. A whispering pin would be funny. Imagine all the things a pin could tell a person: “Oh my . . . her underwear is a little threadbare!” or “Goodness gracious, she is getting rather plump!”

Papa whistled a happy tune as he painted E and S to make it Whispering Pines. Then he started on smaller letters underneath the farmette’s name. Lily hummed along quietly as she watched him. Joseph and Dannie had wandered off to play in the sandbox. They had been watching Papa paint but quickly grew bored. Lily was glad. She liked spending time alone with Papa.

As Papa dipped his paintbrush into the jar, a fat bumblebee circled and buzzed around Lily’s head. She jerked away, but then the bee landed on a freshly painted letter. Its fuzzy black feet were covered in white paint. It walked across the sign and made tiny bee footprints across the green sign.

Lily wanted to swat it away but was afraid that she would ruin Papa’s beautiful sign even more than the bumblebee already had.

“Look, Papa,” she said. “A bumblebee is ruining your sign. It’s making little white tracks over the green background.”

Papa tried to shoo the bumblebee away but its feet seemed to be too heavy with paint to be able to fly. He reached into his pocket and got his big red handkerchief and carefully lifted the bumblebee off the sign. “There. Now it can’t make any more tracks.”

“But it ruined your sign,” Lily said.

Papa only smiled. “I don’t think anyone will notice those tracks unless they look closely.” He dipped his paintbrush back into the jar of paint and started to paint another letter. “You know, Lily, the sign is a lot like the people we meet. If we want to find fault with it, we can look much closer and see things like those little tracks. In fact, by looking too closely, you’ll notice that some of the letters aren’t exactly perfect. If we focus on those little faults, we’ll forget that the sign is actually a pretty good sign.”

Papa put the paintbrush down. “I could brush some more green paint over those little tracks, but I think I’ll just leave them. That way whenever you and I see this sign, it can remind us to focus on the good things in the people we meet instead of any little faults they might have.”

Aaron Yoder and Effie Kauffman, he meant. Each day, Lily had come home from school with new complaints about Aaron and Effie. Perfectly reasonable complaints.

Papa kept on painting and before long, he was satisfied the sign was done. Whispering Pines was on the top in nice big letters, curved like a rainbow. In smaller letters underneath were the words, Solid Oak, Cherry, and Walnut Furniture.

“I’ll go get the posts ready for our sign,” Papa said. “Want to come with me?”

Lily quickly put her chair back inside the house and followed Papa to the end of the driveway. Joseph and Dannie dropped their toys in the sandbox and hurried to join them. They watched with interest as Papa used his posthole digger and shovel to dig two deep holes. Digging, apparently, was more interesting to little boys than painting. Once the holes were deep enough, Papa put a long post into each hole. As he held the posts straight, he asked the children to drop stones into the holes around the posts.

Once the posts stood straight without help, Papa threw in big shovelfuls of dirt until the holes were filled all the way to the top. He packed the dirt firmly, then tried to wiggle the posts. They didn’t budge. Not an inch. And Papa was satisfied.

The next day, Papa carried the sign to the end of the driveway and nailed it to the posts. Mama planted a nice circle of pretty pink impatiens flowers around the signposts. Lily thought the whole thing looked beautiful.

She couldn’t see those little white tracks the bumblebee had made but she knew they were there. She knew the sign would remind her to focus on the good in others. She hoped such thinking might work with Aaron Yoder and Effie Kauffman, but she doubted it.