In a video that has gone viral on social media, a Ukrainian woman offers a heavily armed invading Russian soldier sunflower seeds, telling him he should fill his pockets with them so that when he dies sunflowers will grow on the Ukrainian soil where he falls.

I was not aware of any of this until the other day, during a FaceTime conversation with my sister back in Michigan. As we talked, she cut sunflowers from heavy canvas, painted and gessoed them and attached the flowers somehow to sticks that can be stuck into the ground in people’s front yards to show support for peace in Ukraine.

“I give them to people, and I tell them about UNICEF,” she told me. UNICEF is supplying humanitarian help to Ukrainian children. Her sunflowers are striking and all the more visible for being decidedly out of season in the Detroit area.

A word to the wise: Look at your calendar. April Fool’s Day is Friday, April first; people will be trying to play practical jokes on you. Don’t believe anything anyone says to you on this day! But on the other hand, that could also get you in trouble.

April Fools Day has been celebrated for centuries in different ways in many countries. My favorite is the festival of Hilaria in Ancient Rome, when people would dress up in disguises and go out and confront others, even powerful magistrates. I imagine a citizen in a supposedly impenetrable disguise of false nose and beard making fun of a high government official and thinking he would never be identified, branded as a troublemaker and watched from then on, no matter how hilarious his antics might have been. Possibly, though, everything that happened in Hilaria stayed in Hilaria.

After all the years since we humans evolved from other great apes, you would think that we would have been able to outgrow certain tendencies that have caused problems on a continual basis. Rachel, an old high school friend of mine, became a primatologist and traveled to Africa to observe and study chimpanzees. This was a long time ago, when I was still young and had a romantic and unrealistic view of chimps as unspoiled creatures with none of the character defects of warmongering human beings. When Rachel came home for a visit I attended a lecture she gave at our old school, and I was sadly disillusioned.

The scientists were following and watching a band of chimpanzees, noting the ways they interacted in their daily lives. All was relatively calm until one day a male chimp who had been out scouting returned to the group visibly excited. Other males gathered around him; the excitement was contagious. A group of male chimpanzees followed him, moving quickly and noisily, for miles through the forest.

One young female went along, but seemed a little lost and out of her element, Annie said; apparently she had just gone along with the boys. The scout led them to a troop of stranger chimpanzees he had spied in his travels. Then the traveling war party–because, as it turned out, that is what they were–took the strangers by surprise and violently attacked them, killing some and sending the rest running.

After the raid, Annie said, the attackers returned to their group, quietly now, and moving slowly. Annie seemed as sorry as I felt to have learned the truth about the loveable chimps she thought she had come to know.

So yes, we use electronic devices and wear business suits — well, some of us do–and get our hair done and learn various languages and we think we’re so great, but no matter how much our brains have evolved, we are still apes.

I’ve been wondering: what if some other species instead of our ape ancestors had evolved a freak mutant brain? No matter how intelligent they became, they would still retain their original tendencies. Crows and magpies (evolved from dinosaurs!) would steal shiny objects. They wouldn’t even know why, but they would feel compelled to do it. Dogs would try to create world peace, but would still chase anything that ran and would find it difficult to resist getting into the garbage.

Have a good week!

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)