I tracked down my father, who had wandered a little distance from the garden and was sitting against a tree trunk. In his fingers he carefully stretched out something that looked like a wasp, still alive. It was as broad as my hand, and had a yellow “8” on each clear wing, as plain as if some careful school child or God had painted it there. My father looked like he’d just had a look down Main Street, Heaven.

He told me, “There aren’t any pollinators.”

“What?”

“No insects here, to pollinate the garden. Look at this thing. How would it know what to do with a Kentucky Wonder bean?”

I couldn’t know if he was right or wrong. I only faintly understood about pollination. I did know that the industrious bees did the most of it. “I guess we should have brought some bees over in our pockets too.”

He looked at me like I was his spanking newborn baby; as if he loved me terribly but the world would never be what any of us had hoped for. “Rae Ann, honey,” he said, “you can’t bring the bees. You might as well bring the whole world over here with you, and there’s no room for it.”

“I know.”

Barbara Kingsolver
TUCSON, ARIZONA