Ask Any Insect

Here’s a thought for the day: Trees win. The boy who owned this bike parked it and went to war in 1914 and maybe he was one of the 21 million who died during that horrid global conflict. In his book “The History of Everything” Bill Bryson says that that same number died in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, also known as the Spanish Flu and the Swine Flu. The difference: it took four years and the senseless slaughter brought about by trench warfare to kill all the combatants in that conflict. It took the Flu four months. And yet....And yet: the boy went off and the bike leaned waiting for him against the then-young tree. Did the tree come to feel sorry for the bike? Did it extend itself to embrace him, saying “Come I’ve got you now”?  Whatever happened, I take it for a message from the universe: Trees win. Life wins. Ask any insect. Ask any microbe.