The bee tree

The buzz of spring, plus Links of the Week: blind innovators, ancient trees, and the basketball game of the century

This is the prime time of the year for the cherry tree in our front yard. We were on vacation for a few days, and a few flowers had just popped open before we left. I thought we might miss the full bloom. I’d like to think it waited on us.

Every year the cycles of nature show us something new. This year it was the bees. We hadn’t seen them in the cherry tree before. But this year they swarmed it. Every pollination is a threesome — the flower that has the pollen, the flower that needs it, and the pollinator in between. For a day or two there our cherry tree was the Playboy Mansion.

Every season is made up of mini-seasons. In the spring you get the tulip spring, the azalea spring, the camellia spring and so on. (The pollen spring lasts the whole damn time.) The cherry spring — at least the one in our yard — often comes and goes in a week. One day I see a few white blooms; a couple days later, the whole tree is bedazzled; a few days after that, there’s nothing but a carpet of petals.

We had a big storm Thursday morning, and I figured the flowers were done for, but by Thursday afternoon it was clear and brilliant and almost all of then had hung on. It feels like the bloom has lasted longer this year. Or maybe I just want it to.

10 things I wanted to share with you this week:

1. My guest on the new episode of SouthBound was Kristen Green, who has a powerful new book called THE DEVIL’S HALF ACRE about an enslaved woman who transformed a notorious old slave jail in Richmond.

2. I was honored to be the guest on an episode of Storybound, a podcast where they take authors’ readings and turn them into a sort of radio theater. I love what they did with the excerpts I read from THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.

3. My favorite story this week was Isa Cueto’s piece about the blind students who spawned decades of innovations from a basement office in Berkeley nicknamed The Cave. This could be a book.

4. I loved Jen McGivney’s tribute to the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, told through her memories of a life listening to the Foos.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book about the Westminster Dog Show and the bond between dogs and their people, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: The most popular breeds of 2021.

6. I’m loving Substack, but the subscription model for writers ain’t exactly new — Alexander Pope tried something similar 300 years ago. Getting screwed over by his publisher led him to write this couplet that cracked me up:
   

   What Authors lose, their Booksellers have won,
   So Pimps grow rich, while Gallants are undone.
   
   Preach, Alex.

7. Latria Graham writes about nature better than anyone I know. Here she is in Garden & Gun on the wisdom of ancient trees.

8. Another G&G piece I enjoyed: Will Blythe on the monumental UNC-Duke Final Four game this Saturday. Will is the perfect person for that story, having written the definitive book on the rivalry: TO HATE LIKE THIS IS TO BE HAPPY FOREVER.

9. RIP to our old friend and Charlotte Observer colleague Jim Wrinn, who spent the last years of his life in the job he always wanted: editor of Trains magazine.

10. If you need to shake off the last of the winter, a half-hour of the B-52’s from 1978 should do the trick. If you have just a few minutes to spare, fast-forward to 26:45 for “Rock Lobster.”