Solitary bees are making their nests in the stump of an orange tree utilizing what appear to be abandoned beetle borings.
I suspect that these bees are Megachile (Subgenus Chelostomoides) bees because they look like ordinary leafcutter bees but don’t seem to be cutting or carrying leaf fragments to their nests, and they seal the openings of their nest cavities with resin and occasionally other organic material (leaf paste, grass blades, wood) and (possibly) sand and tiny pebbles.
I have a story—another novel excerpt—in the latest issue of El Portal Literary Journal, a publication produced graduate students and faculty at Eastern New Mexico University. El Portal includes writing and art from Eastern New Mexico students as well as other writers far and near. The quality of the writing in El Portal is consistently excellent, and that includes the student writers. I am honored to be published with them. I have a recollection of El Portal being one of the mainstays of the Southwest literary scene back in the days of my youth, alongside journals like Arizona Quarterly and (the now defunct) New Mexico Quarterly—a place that published many important writers with southwestern roots along with others who taught and lived in the Southwest. It certainly has a long history and is still in the hands of exceedingly discerning and capable editors.
Siempre será Pentecostés en la Iglesia, pero mientras
la Iglesia haga su rostro transparente a la belleza del Espíritu Santo. Cuando
la Iglesia deja de apoyar su fuerzaen esa virtud de lo alto que Cristo le
prometió y que le dio en este día, y la Iglesia quisiera apoyarse más bienen
las fuerzas frágiles del poder o de la riquezade esta tierra, entonces la
Iglesia deja de ser noticia. La Iglesia será bella, perennemente joven, atrayente
en todos los siglos, mientras sea fiel al Espíritu que la inunday lo refleje a
través de las comunidades, a través de sus pastores, a través de su misma vida.
--San Oscar Romero, 14 de mayo, 1978
I wanted to mention that I have a new story in Sublunary Review. It's the latest (and probably the last) of the "Zoë stories." Sublunary Review is a fabulous journal, and the editors do a beautiful job with the layout and illustrations for the work they publish. I feel so honored—it's like my work is being presented in a palace or a splendid museum. And this story allows me to pay tribute to Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and Goethe’s Marchen, amid all sorts of fun and whimsy and playfulness, with a serious message underlying it all.
