Bee Sighting is the first of four installments of a data-laden narrative. The story follows a parent in the fall of 2018 dealing with the conjunction of crises we face.

I like to be helpful. I get out of bed: my wife needs sleep and this sweet baby does not need to breastfeed at 3am. She just needs a little company. I play the baby heart song on my phone. I pick up my sweet baby out of her crib. I hold her in my arms and rock her in the chair. The crying slows and stops as we rock.

Today was another unseasonably warm October day. The high was 88 degrees, well over the average. Two degrees from the record. It made for a hot stroller walk. Her chubby cheeks glistened as soon as we are out of the shade of the carport. She’s got a perfectly round face. 95th percentile head circumference. I pushed the folding stroller, adjusted back to baby size. My son’s pride at being an older brother outweighed his possessiveness, so he was excited about letting baby sister have it. I struggled with its adjustable handle that stopped working 2 weeks after we bought it (5 years ago). We meant to send it back, but since we suck at adulting, we couldn’t even manage to call customer service.

The stroller’s shade extended, a clip-on fan blowing on her, I pushed the stroller up the cul de sac. Sweat and heat stuck to me. There was no getting them off. No rubbing, flinging, or violent kicking can unstick it. Each day we get further into October, I expect it to cool off, tilt and rotation of the planet and all that. It doesn’t. The heat is stuck on high.

Seasonal change seems like a reasonable expectation at this latitude. News stories on the radio tell me we have it relatively easy here. Farmers in Central America are dropping dead from heat-related illness. It’s affecting their livers. In Knoxville, TN, the less-intense-than-Central-American heat continues day after day, and knowing that people elsewhere are dying helps me count my lucky stars. But still, I need it to cool off.

We saw a lone honeybee do its crawl-dig nectar collection from some clover. The nectar is transformed into honey through an incredible process of regurgitation and consumption, regurgitation and consumption. I learned that watching SciShow Kids with my son. How else could nectar get so viscous? As I dragged myself through the thick air, I looked at the anesthetized landscape and thought that this worker bee’s honey would be unlikely to alleviate anyone’s allergies. This one probably didn’t contribute to the geographically fuzzy “local” honey that’s on our shelf at the house.

I pointed out the bee to my daughter, despite the fact that she can’t yet focus on much other than human faces. I make a big deal out of all the bee species we cross paths with. Her experience with bee quantity is unlike mine 40 years ago. I remember my first sting, a vignette-style mental picture, live action: stepping on a bee in a weedy yard with white clover at the church pool on my way to get a pop out of the vending machine. It was one of many bees: so many I didn’t pay attention.

I read that it’s a mite from Asia that causes hive collapse. Things from faraway places, here. Like the brown marmorated stinkbug. The hammerhead worm. Kudzu. Honeysuckle. Whatever fungus killed the American Chestnut. Non-native species, like white settlers. Talk about bringing diseases!

As I rocked my daughter, my memory of the day wandered to the trees. The sun bakes them. The terraces of dogwood branches sport shriveled leaves. The muscular trunks of Japanese Maples flake sections of their bark. The towering yellow poplars reach up and out, and I catch myself in doom. Stuck inside my head with climate catastrophe at 3am is not reaching up nor out.