I'm Italy Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

As a child, I believed everything anyone told me, as long as it was a good story.

If it was something that delighted me or frightened me or seemed to have a purpose to his narrative,

then I was all in.

There wasn't much of a difference between ASAP's fable and my mother telling me about a weasel

killing the chickens we kept in the backyard.

All stories seemed equally connected and equally true, equally important.

Up until recently, I believed what I once heard that Pienese, one of my favorite flowers,

actually required ants to bloom.

I thought they tickled the petals open, and I imagined their little feet doing the work

of slowly opening those tightly packed petals until voila, the flower was open and symbiotic

relationships all made sense.

But it turns out that's not entirely true.

Animals do feast on the nectar of Pienese, and ants do protect Pienese from aphids, so

the relationship is mutually beneficial, but the flowers do not require ants to open them.

Now I miss that myth.

I miss it because I am always looking for examples of how species are all intertwined, how

we need one another to survive in this world.

A few days ago, a friend told me that Spanish moss, a moss I love, the way it droops down

over the water oaks like mint-colored lace trapping the world in a gauzy, dappled light, was

actually killing the trees.

But this myth is gratefully not true.

...