A Story About Bees

When I was eight years old, the gully across the street was my kingdom. It was a wild, adventurous realm, perfect for an ADHD-fueled boy with a knack for turning curiosity into calamity. My friend and I spent countless hours there, digging, exploring, and occasionally getting into trouble. But one day, the gully fought back—and it fought back hard.

We were deep in our mission, excavating softened, rotted wood at the bottom of the gully. The wood had this odd reddish hue, and whether it was actually redwood or just nature’s way of being weird, I’ll never know. The buzzing of a few bees added an annoying background soundtrack to our adventure, but we were determined to press on.

Then came the obstacle: a skinny little tree, stubbornly planted right in the middle of our excavation site. It was like the universe’s middle finger to our progress. We hacked, we tugged, we argued with it, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, I took matters into my own hands—or rather, both hands—and grabbed it with all the determination an eight-year-old could muster. I yanked with everything I had.

CRACK!

The tree surrendered… and so did my sense of safety. In an instant, I was covered, head to toe, in wasps. Turns out, I hadn’t just annoyed a tree—I had just evicted an entire wasp colony. The buzzing that had been a minor annoyance was now an angry symphony of winged vengeance.

Adrenaline kicked in, and I bolted. I ran screaming up the steep gully, across the street, and up the stairs to my house, a living blur of flailing limbs and stinging fury. My mom heard the commotion and opened the door, greeted by the unforgettable sight of her son in full wasp attack mode.

She screamed. I screamed. The wasps probably screamed in their own waspy way. It was a chaotic masterpiece.

Without missing a beat, my mother transformed into a combat medic. She herded me into the washroom, clothes flying off as she worked to rid me of the still-clinging attackers. Soon, I was sitting in a bath, covered in red, angry stings, my dignity left somewhere in the gully.

And that, my friends, is how I learned two valuable lessons: 1) never underestimate a skinny tree, and 2) sometimes the gully wins.