So many

The picnic table this morning dark and soft, soaked with heavy dew. Perhaps even frost on the north side of the cedar break. The wood cool through my jeans. My coffee steams. The tree's rustle has stiffened in the last few days, it's now a scroop – that wonderful word for the sound of treated silk. Victorian, autumnal. Fall. Purple asters have bloomed overnight. Mums are blooming, showy stonecrop starting to show off, coneflower almost down to the cone, black-eyed susans losing petals.

In a clump of shastas, exuberant and unruly as my hair this morning, a fat furry bee stuffs his pockets. A bumble, bumbling. He doesn't harvest them, one the next the next. Instead he circles a yellow face twice and hops into the air as if about to stroll off, but then his eye is caught by another yellow and he plops down. How can he leave them? There are so many, and their faces are so open.