Knees

Knees are a funny thing, bendy and angular, like when a person is long and lanky, and his knees come up above his shoulders when he sits on the ground.

Cypresses have knees too. I’ve always loved that term — cypress knees. They stick up out of the ground, gnarled with bark and knobs, while the remainder of the cypress roots are submerged. The knees protrude above the land — and the water — breaking the surface so the tree can breathe in lowlands prone to flooding.

This is a boring prompt. What else about knees?

Elephants have fat knees. Knees like tree stumps, except they bend.

Deer have thin knees on toothpick legs that look like you could snap them in half like a twig.

Do squirrels have knees? Bees have knees, according to the saying. Something must be wonderful about bees’ knees, though I don’t know what it might be. Is it because they are knee deep in nectar, or maybe in honey, making their knees sweet? Or maybe it’s just because bees rhymes with knees.

Actually, it’s neither, according to Oxford Dictionaries:

The phrase was first recorded in the late 18th century, when it was used to mean ‘something very small and insignificant’. Its current meaning dates from the 1920s, at which time a whole collection of American slang expressions were coined with the meaning ‘an outstanding person or thing’. Examples included the flea’s eyebrows, the canary’s tusks, and one that still survives – the cat’s whiskers. The switch in meaning for the bee’s knees probably emerged because it was so similar in structure and pattern to these other phrases.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.