the mortal remains of bees

It’s been a strange week. On Monday, I arrived early at work to find not one, but two dead deer on the property. Two full sized deer; one near the employee entrance I normally use, and the other near the main entrance. Not only is it odd that there were two of them, but also strange because we are not near a major or busy road, so it would be hard to believe that someone would hit two deer whilst driving down the winding road that our building is off of. Also, we are right on a lake, so I can’t imagine where they were crossing from. There is a small wooded area further up the road so I suppose they could have come from there.

Even stranger than this is the fact that I had a dream about deer the night before. Coincidence, I’m sure. I’m not one to believe in psychic stuff. Creepy nonetheless. Worse still is that today is Wednesday, and the deer have still not been removed from the property; something to do with government workers being off on holidays over the weekend. Someone has laid a tarp over each of them and marked the spot with some pylons. When I look out the window it looks like a crime scene.

Last night, I dreamt that one of the deer was speaking to me. It told me that it had a broken leg and managed to make it over the building before it collapsed, where it shivered all night in the cold before finally dying. I woke up very upset and even writing about it now is bringing tears to my eyes. Welcome to the wild and weird world of pregnancy hormones.

Another thing I have been noticing not just this week, but last week as well, is the number of other coincidences that have been occurring. I am not necessarily going to make anything out of this but I thought it would be interesting to document it. There are four “subjects” that have come up again and again, either on television, in the conversations of others I have overheard, or in something I have read. I have been writing these down. Here is my list:

Genesis (Adam and Eve)
Shel Silverstein (the guy who wrote “Where the Sidewalk Ends”)
The Crimean War
Bees

The reason I started writing these down is because, after I had watched a nature show on bees with my husband, we had a long conversation about how few bees we have seen in our garden over the last couple of years, and how we wondered if they are a gauge of a change in environmental conditions just as frogs are. The next day I was scanning the news online and came across an essay written recently by Fidel Castro on US Brazil relations and environmental issues. One of the subjects in his essay was bees, and how the bee population in North America has decreased by 25%. What is alarming about this, according to some scientists that are studying this issue, is that there are no mortal remains of bees to be found, it’s like they have simply disappeared. Something about those words ‘mortal remains of bees’ struck me as particularly beautiful and ethereal. It also made me sad, just as the deer have, and have brought back those feelings of vulnerability that I think accompany pregnancy for so many women. Perhaps the reason I am documenting all of these things is because I am secretly looking for a message in all of this.

A few years ago, when I worked further West, I was driving home in the evening along one of the back roads I usually took to avoid the rush hour traffic. There are a lot of farms along this road. As I came up over a hill I noticed that the traffic ahead of me was slowing. As I approached the other vehicles, I could hear a strange pounding sound. To my shock, a huge black horse came racing down the side of the road, a colt right behind him. As they wove in and out of the cars, I noticed that the black horse still had reigns on him, and guessed that they must have escaped from one of the farms. Though all of the eastbound traffic had stopped, the westbound traffic could not see the horses and was still flowing. For a moment, I was in a movie and everything slowed down as the horses crossed right in front of my car, just as a truck approached from the other direction. I felt my hand go to my mouth and waited for the truck to see the horses. It did not. I felt my stomach drop and prepared myself (I think) for what I was about to see. Somehow, the horses got across the road before the truck got to them. I watched in my rear view mirror as they continued down the road, cars pulling over to the side to let them through.

I remember the sounds that the horses made to this day. I heard the black one breathing through my open window as he crossed in front of my car; saw his terrified eyeball rolling in his head before he dove back out into the chaos. It was one of the most beautiful and haunting things I have ever seen in my life. It felt like it was supposed to mean something. I guess I feel the same way about the deer and the bees and all of the other random coincidences.