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Post by mcmillid on Apr 20, 2011 16:20:33 GMT -5
I'm just experimenting to see if this is the way you do this. If you can access and read my story, would appreciate your comments. Danny McMillion Attachments:
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Post by Raymond Neely on Apr 22, 2011 7:46:00 GMT -5
McMillid,
You can go ahead and type your story where you typed this message when you go to "new thread" under your category, but this will also work.
Raymond Neely
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Post by Raymond Neely on Apr 22, 2011 7:49:38 GMT -5
Couldn't open your document. Try typing it in the message box.
Raymond Neely
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Post by mcmillid on Apr 24, 2011 6:39:42 GMT -5
The Return of the Bug
Yesterday I was out walking in my yard. Blue violets covered every square inch for a veritable carpet of fragrant blossoms. Yet I walked without fear. Ten years ago, I couldn’t have done that, you see, because I’m allergic to bee stings and the field would have been working alive with bees as they sought the nectar of the blossoms. The bee has virtually disappeared from the landscape. The honeybee went first, then the lesser bees. How long has it been since you were stung by a sweat bee? Bumblebees last only a few days then I see them clinging to the eaves as they frantically scrub their legs over their abdomens slowly suffocating as they succumb to the trachea mite that is devastating the bee population of North America. Yesterday I saw a butterfly swooping across the yard. I watched its solitary journey for ten or fifteen minutes. No other butterflies joined it in its romp in the sunshine. When I was a child, a mere sixty years ago, where you saw one butterfly, you saw dozens. We, as children, chased them, netted them, imprisoned them in jars, studied them. Today I wouldn’t dare catch what may be the last butterfly in Raleigh County. Yesteryear, my mother would give a pint jar and send me to the garden to pick the Japanese beetles from the veggies. I would cap the jar tightly when it was filled with beetles and leave them to their fate. Sounds cruel that, but it only killed the beetles I plucked from our food supply. It didn’t annihilate every single Japanese beetle within a fifty mile radius as the pesticides we use today, does. When I was a child the cicadas were so numerous, my brothers and I would stand on the front porch and have gravel shooter contests to see who could shoot down the most cicadas as they flew through the air. I often won. I was deadly with a slingshot in those days. We searched the tree trunks for the discarded bug shaped chitin shells left as the cicada shed their underground persona for one more air worthy. We gathered these into Mom’s canning jars which we liberated from the cellar. I seem to remember that Mom wasn’t too thrilled with our hobby that year. A couple years ago we had a cicada year which occurs only every seventeen years and I only saw maybe a dozen or so discarded shells. As I recall people weren’t too thrilled by cicadas in those long ago days. They were noisy, and their egg laying activity damaged timber so that you saw the dead ends of branches all over the countryside as you drove through. It used to be that the appearance of the green katydid in late summer meant only six more weeks until a killing frost. I searched in vain last summer for a single katydid to predict the onset of frost and winter weather. I found none. Has the insecticides we pour forth on our lawns to insure lush green grass for us to gaze out our windows upon, killed all the katydids, all the butterflies, all the bumblebees, those impossibly aerodynamic denizens of the air. You know by every law governing flight known to man, the bumblebee is incapable of flight, however they still flew. Is this marvel of nature destined to become a dinosaur? You know, it appears to me as I walk through my field of violets that mankind better be praying for the return of the bug.
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Post by Raymond Neely on Apr 24, 2011 13:46:34 GMT -5
Nice, and thanks a bunch for sharing it with us. Been dealing with a massive infestation of wood boring bees where we live. It's a raging hive of them in our rafters. Been there for ten years.
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Post by peggydebnam on Apr 24, 2011 19:55:42 GMT -5
Not sure if this message will reach Danny but you.ve done it again. Wonderful story Peggy Debnam
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