I used to keep bees. You know, those little, precious, busy buzzy bees that sniff around the dandelions on your front yard and turn it all into honey? Those bees? I liked it. I liked them.
I wasn’t very good at it, of course. I mean, as a hobby goes it was fine. How successful do you have to be at a hobby, after all? It’s not like you have to do it to survive and not die or anything. I wasn’t looking for the Nobel prize in beekeeping or anything. No farmer is. I just did it. Because. I don’t know. Because I wanted to and I liked to. And I thought it would be a good thing to do. Not because I wanted to be good at it or needed to to survive.
I made enough for myself and to give to family and friends and people I cared for. After a motorcycle accident I endured and survived painfully I made a habit of visiting people I knew who were in distress or recovering from a medical condition or accident of their own. Again, I really don’t know why. I just did. I gave them a bit of honey in a bear shaped bottle, cute that it was, and a moment of comfort. Maybe a joke or a wry comment. A bit of levity, a bit of myself, and a bit of solidarity. It seemed natural. I gave what I could. I just wanted to say, Here. I have no idea what you are going through, but I know it is not pleasant. You are not alone. Here’s a bear full of honey! It seemed like the right thing to do.
What more do you have to do to enjoy a hobby? Just don’t kill the thing you are hobby-ing, as it were. I even combined it with my other unsuccessful hobby of woodworking. You know. Scraping wood together and then gluing all the bits and pieces into something odd and whatnot? Maybe whacking a nail in here and there? Turning it into…? Things?
Well, it was successful enough, I guess. In tandem, that is. One thing after another. I unsuccessfully built beehives and filled them with unsuccessful colonies of bees, successfully enough. Well, the bees were successful. Bees can be very tolerant of where they live. A hole in the wall is as good a home as the Taj Mahal, after all. Was mine all that better? Um… Maybe?
I liked keeping bees. And I continued liking keeping bees for about ten years. They and I had a good relationship. Just stay out of my way and I’ll keep making something useful out of my life. And if you’re really, really, nice to me and not a jerk, and you keep my home from being knocked over by bears and such, you can have a little bit of it for yourself. You just try and do the same with your own way if you can. That was much more successful than my marriage, now that I think of it. I could relate.
I had a high point in my bee keeping career. I had two hives in my own backyard, two hives in my cousin’s farm, two in his pumpkin patch, and one in my brother’s front yard. Seven total! All busy bee-ing away. It was awesome. Back then I still had a motor scooter and had it all decked out so I could scoot from hive to hive and husband them all. It was something I enjoyed. And actually loved.
I’d stop buy once a week, busy bee that I was, and check on them. Bee keeping is like any other animal husbandry-you just feed them, provide shelter for them, care for them, build a barn, a sty, a coop, a college dorm, or a stable for them-or in this case a hive, be there for them, protect them, and generally leave them alone while they are doing what they do best by themselves, which is getting along with the business of growing, prospering, building their world, working on their master’s degree, and being alive. Pretty much what we do for ourselves when left to it. One living thing to another. Life gets along with life remarkably well, sometimes. If we let it.
I failed to bring my bee keeping hobby to Florida when I moved down south. I guess that is one of the sorrows of the migrant. They say you can’t go home again. Sometimes you can’t bring your cherished home with you. My grandparents, both migrants from the ‘Old Country,’ brought customs with them that I cherished as a child growing up in eastern Connecticut. I didn’t think of them as ‘Old Country’ stuff. It was just… well, stuff. Stuff my grandparents did. Stuff I did. Stuff of life and living. Stuff that is. Stuff that was. Stuff that I have with myself today and always will. Stuff.
Of course, to me it was just normal. Regular, even. My father with his garden and his workshop. My grandfather with his farm, where he and Grammy kept chickens, roosters, cows, and pigs. I stayed over once in a while and got up early to watch Grampa tend his chores. A garden off Grammy’s kitchen just beyond the crab apple tree and the summer kitchen and a barn for Grampa’s tractor across the lawn and past the cock house. I remember them covered in concord grape vines and bees’ nests. Funny how memory works. The chicken coop was beyond the hill. Just upon the slope draining down to the dump.
They had hay fields which the men worked in the summer bringing fodder and seed into the lofts of the barn so the cows could feed all winter. And they had grain bins in the barn with feral cats living nearby in crooks and cracks, crannies and crevices that only cats could find to keep down the mice. The cats’ nests were always warm and cozy, as you would expect from cats after all, even those living in an unheated barn. Grampa tolerated the sneaky, cozy cats, within reason, as long as they served a purpose. After that, they were just more vermin to be drowned at birth. Farms are cruel. We urban folk came by to grab a kitten or two once in a while to serve as pets, lucky felines. It was normal. It was what we expected, now and always. It was stuff.
They say you can never go home again. You can never leave it, either. Part of me lives in the past as does it live in me. Part of me dies there as wall. I love it. I miss it. I live in it always.
I miss them, my little, precious, busy buzzy bees.
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