I'm Ada Limone, 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, that I was all in.

There wasn't much of a difference between Aesop'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 peonies, one of my favorite flowers,

actually required ants to bloom. I thought they tickled the petals open, and I imagine 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. Ants do feast on the nectar of

peonies and ants do protect peonies 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 traping the world in a gauzy dappled light

was actually killing the trees. But this myth is gratefully not true. We investigated further,

and it turns out Spanish moss gets no nutrients from the trees, but rather takes the

moisture and sunlight out of the air. It's also not a moss. It's a bromeliad. It's also not Spanish,

but native to the U.S. and Mexico and South America. I like that I can still love Spanish moss,

and can still think of those beautiful fabric-like threads

floating through the canopy as benevolent.

I want all the good myths to be true,

because I want to believe in wonder. Today's poem examines another

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