HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

Wishing you a happy and blessed Mother's Day, whether you have human children, fur children, or are a steward of your neighborhood, society or the earth. Mothers come in all sizes and descriptions, all distinguished by their love and sense of service. Blessings of the day, to all!

Swarmy Weather

I stepped out onto the deck, yesterday, just in time to hear a swarm ascending from our bee hives. It took me a moment to spot it, as it circled up into the blue sky. I didn’t want to believe that I knew what I knew. I wanted to pretend that it was just a training flight of new bees or an aerial combat between two hives. But the sound of a swarm is distinctive; there’s no mistaking its deep, mysterious drone. We definitely had a swarm and that means . . . ACTION!

I called David, who came running. We watched as the swarm spiraled through the air, an expansive, swirling, spiraling ball of bees that slowly coalesced around an oak branch and, within minutes, formed the distinctive melon-shaped mass of a quiescent swarm. The only problem was, the mass hung over twenty feet off the ground, surrounded by densely protective leaves and branches. David made his pronouncement: too high; too hard to get; have to let them go.

At that very moment, our neighbor to the south, Mark, arrived and David pointed out the swarm to him, telling some old war stores of other swarm captures, in the process. Something in those tellings must have galvanized his will because, suddenly, David was heading to the shed for his 25-foot extension ladder and was jabbing it into the branches of the swarm tree, looking for firm anchorage.

Now, David’s mother, Frances, God rest her soul, once told me “never stifle a noble impulse,” and this seemed apt advice for this apparent suicide mission. So I raced to get the bee box out of the trunk of my car, where it’s lived ever since the last ill-fated swarm capture (see blog post “To Bee or Not to Bee,” April 2, 2012) and to collect our hats with bee veils and other protective gear and, most important, a roll of duct tape.

A couple of years ago, we had a swarm in this same tree, at about the same height. On that occasion, too, David used the extension ladder to get within range of the bees, who cleverly depend themselves near the ends of branches, where no ladder can be leaned. Using loppers, that time and this, he began clearing the field of action.

Meanwhile, I set about constructing, with neighbor Mark’s help, a repeat of the device we invented on that first occasion, which I christened the Chinese bee box. This consists of four 8-foot bamboo poles, duct taped to the corners of the cardboard box. Hoisted on these shaky extensions, the box can be placed directly under the swarm. David then shakes the branch, the bees fall into the box, et voilá! The swarm is captured.

Yesterday’s mission required that I ascend the extension ladder, too, as, even with extensions on the box it was impossible to reach the swarm without mounting at least four steps. As I was now wearing the bee veil, which is roughly similar to wearing dark glasses in a movie theater, and had duct taped my gloves to the cuffs of my coat, and my pants hems to the tops of my shoes, I was moving with somewhat less than fluid grace, and performed this maneuver, shaky apparatus in hand, with some difficulty.

So there David and I were, lined up on the ladder, the swarm mass tantalizingly out of reach to our left. I held the box up and out, positioning it as closely as possible under the bees. David gave the branch a mighty jerk. The bees obligingly fell into the box, en masse. And all seemed right with the world, except for my little part of it.

This requires your imagination: you’re about four feet above the ground – uneven ground that makes the ladder slightly shaky, to begin with; you’re half-blind, and bound in duct tape like a hostage; you’re holding up this ridiculous contraption that threatens to fall apart just from being hoisted; and SUDDENLY, about ten pounds of bees land smack dab on top of the whole outrageous contrivance, with a few hundred left over to cascade all over yourself. Even under your imaginary bee veil you can clearly see that this is a recipe for disaster!

Since I was holding the box out to my left, gravity was having its way with it,  and the box’s trajectory continued southward until, as my mother, God rest her soul, used to say, it was “listing towards Fisher’s.” Radically. The entire box was a hair’s breadth from going smash when I got my four sticks collected against my stomach, steeled my muscles and – as it hung wavering, minutely above the point of no return – slowly, by main strength, brought the box upright, again.

David was able to grab its top edge and stabilize it and down we came: me, sticks, box, bees and David, one perilous step at a time until all of us were on terra firma. We put the top on the box, took the bees immediately to the bee yard, and dumped them into a nice new hive. Then waited, on edge, while the bees decided if they would accept their new lodgings or not. And that, of course, depended upon whether or not we had captured the queen, because whither goeth the queen, thereunto goeth the workers, also.

It appears that we did get the queen. The bees who were outside the hive began docilely sauntering into the hive opening. Bees remaining in the box bottom and top eventually followed suit. And, through the combined efforts of bees and humans, a new bee colony was born.

Of course, this is not without consequences. Both David and I are limping a bit from the exertion. Southern neighbor Mark declared the entire event “complete madness,” and went home and invented and then manufactured a swarm catching device, consisting of a  5-gallon bucket on a pole, that far exceeds in utility the Chinese bee box (but may lack somewhat the latter’s louche charm). Some bees lost their lives in the melee, but not many. David was stung on the thumb, right through his glove. And we went through about 6 dollars worth of duct tape.

We sat on the deck and admired our new hive over glasses of ice water. My hair was plastered, soaked with sweat, to my head, as were David’s and my shirts to our torsos. Swarmy weather is hot weather. We were as moist and resistless as boiled potatoes. When you’re imagining yourself up on that ladder with the sun beating down, wearing a jacket and gloves, Chinese bee box in hand, add copious sweat, especially in the eyes, to your imaginings. You’ll get the picture.

"Well, that was kind of fun," David ventured. "It was fun! Better than a night on the town," I responded. " "Good, because I just got a call that there's a swarm up in the clock tower, at the courthouse . . ." 

A Simple Routine

Exhale daily effluence;
Inhale  life's  affluence.

Postmodern May

        May is bustin’ out all over! Lilacs are going strong. Daffodils are being replaced by lilies. The flowering quince has yielded to clematis. The apple trees are lacy and white as spring brides, and droning with bees.

       Last May I posted this poem, ‘Postmodern May,” and I hope it bears repeating. And I hope it gives you as much fun, reading it, as it gave me, writing it.

Postmodern May

Ms. Nature shuns her millennial personhood

         Rejecting minimalism, Spandex and faded denim

She flaunts her opulence—full-breasted,

         Riotously flower-printed, budding, engorged.

Anorexia is not her style—

         She’s plump and full-hipped.

No cold-eyed stare, no blackened lips—

         She’s tarted up, red and rosy

Showing her sex in every blossom

         Wanton, strumpet-colored, perfumed

Like a slut; still wallowing deep

         In muddy ruts, she powders herself

Lavishly in drifts of pollen.

         She gives cellular and laptop

A different twist, and her blue

         Larkspurs know nothing of S or M.

She’s an old-fashioned kind of a gal

         Who’s abjured car alarms for

The creaking creely-creely of hummingbirds,

         And the chitter of squirrels.

Nothing whited-out or matte-finished

         About her--she’s shiny patent leather

Green, all gleam and glisten and

         Oils on the surface.  She’s given up

Briskness for slow-moving

         Moist, voluptuous airs,

A snip of Queen Anne’s Lace in her bosom,

         A deep moss-green velvet stole about her trunk,

Her head scarved in wind-stretched opalescence,

         And her feet deep in frog-studded standing pools.

She’s a vision; an embarrassment of feminine charms,

         Like some old burlesque queen’s dream

Of youth and beauty. Hear her humming

         Her small songs in the trees, her soft breath

Sighing in little, excited gasps, exhaling

         Essence of a million blooms,

Sweet and rapturous.  Don’t you wish

         You could skip the gym,

Stand up your skinny girlfriend, and roll

         With May on her lush, tassled bosom of grasses?

She’s a phenomenon you can’t deconstruct.

         She’s wet with juices. And she’s beckoning

You.

Invoke the Spring

 Just two weeks ago, snow covered this mountain and the manzanitas were laden with frozen flowers. Two days later, the snow was gone, the manzanitas were still blooming, and bees, both domestic and wild, were droning in the branches. And the black oaks, bare limbed and snow-covered, leafed out after two days of sun.

Life is like that, I’ve found. One day, the clouds roll in, the cold torrent falls and everything seems bleak. In due course, though, the sun comes out, the thaw sends trickles of water chuckling down the ruts and there’s a sweet fragrance in the air. I try to remember this, on my more pessimistic days. Everything cycles. Stasis is an affront to the natural rhythm of things. 

So I’m supposing that this is true for the larger cycles, too. I’m thinking of those historic patterns of repression, war, famine and benighted ignorance; of corruption, greed, and  social inequality. Surely, this long, cold night of human suffering will yield to a dawn. The thaw will come; the flowers will give their honey. If it were not so, I don’t know why any one of us would want to continue on, into the maelstrom that we see and sense is brewing all around us. So hold the cyclic nature of things close to your heart. Invoke the spring, in all its glory. Everything cycles. Stasis is an affront to the natural rhythm of things. The darkness cannot last forever.

The Winds of Change

 The wind blew all night, last night, and is still blowing, this morning. When I went to bed, it was coming from the east. When I got up, it was blowing from the southwest. All night long air surged through the pines, sighing, and the wind chimes dinged endlessly. The still-almost-full moon illuminated a silvery world of flouncing branches and far, platinum hills. I imagine the great vortices of the sky, turning in the night just like the stars; massive volumes of air twirling in a mysterious dance. These are the winds of change that blow away the cool weather of early spring and usher in the heat. The little tomato starts in the garden must be dancing with joy!

Yesterday I finished the first major round of revision and editing of Fiesta of Smoke, a day ahead of schedule--another cause for dancing with joy! It’s almost ten pages shorter, as a result, and a whole lot smoother. I realized in the process that some of the details of the plot, while historically accurate, may seem like fantasy to readers, so I’m going to have to write an epilogue explaining that things like the Albigensian and Children’s Crusades; the Ammonite religion that claims direct, unbroken lineage to Egypt’s pharaohs, and their Sau Tahuti, who never dies; and the current affairs of Mexico, including the fantastic profits of the drug cartels, are all factual. Three myths retold in the book, Egyptian, French and Rarámuri, are accurate, as well.

As soon as I had sent the manuscript for Fiesta of Smoke off to the publisher, yesterday, I went out to the garden and began weeding. My friend in Kentucky, Tammy Horn, author of Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation and Beeconomy: What Women and Bees Can Teach Us about Local Trade and the Global Market, wrote me this morning, saying,

“Editing and weeding are equally satisfying, I've discovered.  I had always told myself that I didn't have time for a garden when writing the two bee books, but now that I have a back garden and a front garden, I *love* weeding...it helps me the same way that editing for about 15 minutes can "jump start" me into writing.  I worked on my garden all day yesterday and it was just a divine experience to turn off the phone, walk away from the computer and be in the sun.”

To which I responded:

“Tammy, you're a woman after my own heart! After so many months in my head, eyes glued to the screen, being in the garden pulling weeds was like heaven, and so grounding! Things are just leafing and budding out, at our elevation, a reminder that the book is in the same phase. No need to panic. Everything ripens at its own pace.”

To which she sent back the rejoinder: 

“And a good reminder that so much development happens in the ground first, before the greening takes place.”

What would we do without Mother Earth, to keep us mindful of the cycling of things? How would we keep ourselves from panic, when life sinks into earthy darkness and seeming inactivity; or when we look at its bare sticks and despair of our lives ever greening, leafing out, budding, blooming and bearing fruit? What would keep down the fear when the strong winds of life blow, if we forgot that they are bringing in the warming trend that makes fruits and vegetables swell and ripen?

Let’s all take the time, today, to step into the sun, to breathe deeply of spring’s scented air and to spread our arms to the winds of change. They’re blowing, whether we like it or not. We may as well welcome them with open arms!

Faster, Faster!

My apologies for being absent from this blog for a few days. I'm in the editing and revision phase of Fiesta of Smoke, with a May 7th deadline looming. Yesterday I finished editing and revising the hard copy, by working at it 8 to 10 hours a day.  A friend told me that it took three editors a year to edit James Mitchner's Hawaii. I've gone through 1011 pages in a week! There are myriad things to check: Spanish and French spelling, punctuation and syntax; historical veracity; the time line of the plot; spelling; internal agreement of the facts; not to mention my own sometimes arcane sentence structure, word choice and verbosity. My desk is cleared except for my laptop, the manuscript box with its two plus reams of paper, a Spanish and a French dictionary, a Thesaurus and a foot-high stack of books on Mexican, particularly Chiapan, history. Now, for the long and intense process of imputing all the changes into the computer.

The cap of my red pen developed a tiny crack, at the beginning of this process. Every time I throw the pen down on the desk and start to rise for a break, the cap flies off and leaps across the desk like a cricket. No amount of careful handling will subvert this pen's will to be capless and ready for action. I say I need a break; it says, No, no! Keep working! It's a small synchronicity but, as I have never in my life had a pen act this way, one that I must heed. Even though my brain feels like it's on fire; despite the crick in my back and the sensation that my fingers are handicapped with lead weights, Fiesta of Smoke is inching its way toward the moment when it leaves my desk, wings its way through cyberspace and lands in the hands of my publisher.

Thank you for your patience with this process. I promise to be back to daily posts, after May 7th. Until then, I hope some passion is calling you with equal ferocity, demanding your focused attention, your creativity and your sense of your own power. After all, isn't dreaming a dream, setting a course toward it, and enduring all storms along the way a big part of what it is to be fully human? So,  hurray for you! Hurray for me! Hurray for our side! And full speed ahead!