I’ve been reading of late that plants can talk to each other and can even talk to certain bugs in a tongue that you and I cannot hear. I tend to believe this, as my bluejay friend, Huckleberry, who stops by every afternoon at Happy Hour for a Beer Nut, flies straight to the same branch of a Sugar Pine, and talks to that Sugar Pine. When I give Huck what he considers to be too small a Beer Nut, he unloads on that Sugar Pine and gives her an earful, so to speak. I’m confident that she commiserates with Huck.

As for Huckleberry, he’s learning to tell time. When he arrives at 4:30 I give him a scolding, “Huckleberry, Happy Hour begins at five, not four thirty!” And sure enough, like a German train, he returns at five o’clock by the watch.

Lately he has taken to waving his beak to the beat of the song I whistle every afternoon, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I would guess Donna Axton would hire Huckleberry to conduct her wonderful chorus if she could get him to attend rehearsals.

Huck has been coming to Twain Haven every afternoon since 2017, not long after he fledged from the second deck here. We’ve been Beer Nut Pals for over three thousand days now, and I have stipulated in my will that he must be welcomed each and every afternoon to Twain Haven until he is called home to a feathery nest in the sky…

Huckleberry has relatives in Genoa to account for the five or six days he has been AWOL here at Twain Haven. People sometimes ask me how I know he goes to Genoa, and I have to confess, “That’s where I’d go.”

As for the Sugar Pine, I call her Joan, as in Joan of Arc, for she knows all of Huck’s secrets, and once we finally figure out how to translate plant talk to human talk, well, Joan will have much to share, having been around since Samuel Clemens visited here.

Now that I think of it, Joan probably speaks Washoe, and we might have to ask a Washoe elder to translate further for us. Meanwhile, I’m going to continue coaching Huckleberry in the rhythm of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and hope he passes it along to Joan. We’re all in this thing together.

Harmony in the universe will be fully revealed once we connect all the dots. I won’t be around to appreciate that moment, but it’s comforting to imagine that a Grand Harmony does in fact exist, and that it’s just a matter of time before Universal Harmony affords us a lasting peace here on Earth. We thank you, Huckleberry, and Joan, for helping to guide us down this most fascinating path…