small change

a taste of honey

It was not quite dawn yet when we rose to let in the bee-herder with his lasso of smoke and coils of vacuum hoses to rid us of the hive thrived in the walls of the house for years. Bleary eyed we ventured out on the road in search of a leisurely breakfast, which we found at the Dipsea Cafe in Mill Valley, just as the sun burst forth from the dusk of night and thin layer of clouds on the horizon.

Meanwhile, back at house, D. Cut a hole in the wall in the closet,  where the hive was, and he set about the business of vacuuming the bees out. That done, he then drove off to relocate the dazed lot of them at their new “home.” When we came back, a few hours later, we found the stragglers in what looked to me like a mad dance of sorts, as they congregated on D.’s  gloves near the front steps of the house.

Then came the business of getting out the hive, which turned out to  measure some 4 square feet. D. remarked that the honey in these combs was remarkably pure. He broke off a couple of pieces from the comb for us, and I set about tasting the honey in the carnage of dead bees still littering the hallway.

Had we waited another year the bees would have built their hive deeper down into the walls, so that this business of relocating them would have involved ripping out walls. Still, in my mind, it suddenly feels oddly quiet -- not that I could hear their humming before, but there was always the odd bee coming through the light fixture in the kitchen, rousing me from whatever I was doing and calling me to rescue it, which I did, whenever I was here by catching in a glass and then setting it free outside.

The work of cleaning up the hive is still going on, as I write this. The honey is dripping from the combs we kept. We will use it to dip our apples in, come Rosh Hashanah.

bees, homing

D., a contractor, yoga teacher, and bee-herder, was supposed to start work on relocating the bees that have been filling our southwest-facing wall with honey for the last two years or so. But D. is not feeling well, so he postponed the big move for our winged companions for another day. Inside the walls, the hum goes unabated for another day. And, outside by the windows, with the bottlebrush hedge erupting at the tips in small red swirls in the fog-driven winds of mornings, perhaps a new cadre of worker bees go about their business, vying every now and then, for a better angle at the source of nectar with the humming birds.

Pesky and bothersome as these bees have been, I will miss them. To have honey in the walls seems like a blessing to the soul and food for the imagination. But the reality of it, the corporeality, is less about nourishment than it is about the messy business of consumption. The bees eating into the walls. The walls so consumed, widening the money pit that a house is underneath all that window dressing.

And so the bees must go, even if it means the end of honey for an imagination so soured on realizing that the home it lived in all these years is, after all, just another house.

between seasons

It’s the third morning of this late August that I turned on the heat because the temperature inside the house was coming close to under 60 degrees. The novelty of all this crazy weather has worn off, and now I am left with a vague confusion, unable to settle into a season, since this none of them is forecast to last more than a matter of days lately.

But it’s more than just the weather. There is that other out-of-season situation: the return of a “prodigal” child. Not so long ago, having gotten over the children moving on, leaving both our home and their childhood, here we are again, back together at home with one. For a while, at least. Until this child – well, young person – grows a full set of functioning new wings.

It’s been a slow process, one that involves the proverbial tiptoe wanderings on eggshells. For all of us, for it can’t easy to be stuck living with your parents in the air-sucking depths of the suburbs when your soul is homesick for the only home it knows: art. That I know something about what this child is going through doesn’t help. In fact, it makes everything worse. I am the mother, and for now, that is the only existence I have in this child’s complicated world. The only way out of this frame, for both us, is for me to get a life beyond the frame, to step away. Yes, to put down that loaded mother of an expectation, and slowly step away … or run, like hell.

And yet, here I am, still watching anxiously over this child’s wings that are gaining lightness with a soft down of small victories, in spite of setbacks in his life. There is his dedication to making the best, for his needs, in a new school with a new direction that was perhaps not of his choosing entirely, given our budget constraints. There is that paying gig he got with a group in a lounge playing the guitar and the French horn (which sat untouched for more than a year, after the child’s lungs collapsed and wouldn’t inflate without surgery). There is the discipline of those almost nightly long, long runs around the neighborhood. There is the growing pile of books, teachers chosen by a sense-seeking self in an education that can’t be bought or taught at schools – at least not for those with this child’s temperament. There are the signs of winnowing of distractions. But most of all, there is the music in the house, like fresh wind, filling the air, chilled as it still may be, once again with oxygen.

August

I met Pica at the Samovar Tea Lounge in the Mission-Castro yesterday. We sat outside, in glorious sunshine, sipping tea and enjoying every bite of our brunch dishes, which took some deliberations in the selection process, given all the delicious choices. I won’t even bother anyone about how long it took for me to finally settle on the pot of white tea, which was to be my beverage.

After our meal, we crossed the street to take a meander in the yarn store. Oh boy -- tea, food, and yarn. But best of all, all this in the company of a good friend!

Since I had to hightail it to a yoga workshop at the Iyengar Institute across town -- more like across the hills of San Francisco – Pica drove me there. In spite of a map and directions on my lap, my performance as a navigator left a lot to be desired, that is for sure. As we drove on -- upwards, that is, we entered a land of fog and dropping temperatures. Welcome to the wonders of the San Francisco Bay Area, where summer and winter can be had in one day!

Meanwhile, back at home (in the sunnier climate of Marin), the spouse and younger son were left in charge of painting a bedroom, which we all prepped the day before. Turns out that their painting skills were on par with my navigating skills, so I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow, on my day off: practicing my newly gleaned yoga skills of equilibrium with brush and roller in hand as a I go for covering up the bumpy rides of yesterday's rollers.

Gratuitous bear post

Not exactly a super-toy, but this bag of rags refuses to go away, even as autumn looms on the horizon. As for its intelligence, there is nothing artificial about it!

 

And, just in case, should any of our descendants, human or robotic, want to reconstruct us from a strand of hair, as they do in Kubrick/Spielberg's "A.I." they'll have no problems, given the bonanza fished from the depth of the tub's drain. In fact, there is enough here for this bear to get stuffed all over again.

trade

There is one thing I am spectacularly bad at, and that is selling. Be it goods, ideas, or myself. In fact, I am so bad at this fundamental requirement for making a living that more often than not I make a good example of how not to do “it.” Take this instance:

Like most people, I am trying to downsize the volume of worldly goods, the reach my worldly aspirations, as well as expectations in general, though this latter category is a tough one. I thought the worldly goods part would be a relative snap, thanks to craigslist and eBay.

As it turns out, what I have to sell, in terms of worldly goods, is also what others have to sell. The economy, it seems, has touched those formerly “golden” acquisitions of ours and turned them into so much shit.

The odd items I listed that sparked interest did so because they probably stirred up the simmering stew of greed in those who thought they could snap up a bargain, which they could turn around into a profit of their own. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and I wish them well in their pursuit. In fact, I think I just actually paid, yes paid, real money, on top of having shipped an item, to one of these people.

Turns out that the buyer of an item I listed on eBay was not happy with the item when she received it because she felt the description didn’t match the condition of the item, and so she wanted her money back. I thought about negotiating with her, but than I realized that the only negotiating I cared for was with my soul and peace of mind, both of which care not for selling.  Or buying, these days, but that is another story.

I returned her money. I have no idea if she’ll ship the item back, and I do not care. The fact that I lost money by paying more for the shipping than I had originally accounted for doesn’t matter to me. That loss is just a small reminder that I should have just given this item away, as I have many others.

Perhaps the rains of the Pacific Northwest, where I used to live, have thoroughly soaked the spirit of the potlatch into the marrow of my bones – except that the pursuit of prestige was never my aim. Only lightness.

a matter of taste

Husks. Even the sound this word makes is ghostly. Fading echo of something gone, missing. A marker of the imminent presence of absence.

Containers, on the other hand, corral vigorously, not just marking boundaries, but also, possibly, keeping something unexpected under wraps. Possibility simmering under the lid. A marker of imminent presence.

Metaphysics notwithstanding, the tomatillos, which were ripped from these husks, were delicious. In the end, that is what matters.