A chance meeting with his ex-honey sets the gardener abuzz.
I’ll have to think about it, I said.
A year ago, even six months, I could have said in a flash what I wanted. Now I track thoughts like gigantic rail cars heading toward a state past Wyoming, the state of paralysis. Just when I was starting to feel disencumbered of raw feelings, when I could occasionally walk through the remade front garden without queasiness, I turned down an aisle at the Bowl and there was my ex, Flora, scooping almonds into a plastic bag. I probably could have slipped away. When our eyes met I was surprisingly at ease. How was her cat? Poor thing. What about Rita? she wondered. Was I still going to yoga?
She invited me to tea; I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. At the cafe, cradling a steaming cup, she asked if I’d been thinking about us.
“Us? What do you mean?”
“Us. You and me.”
“I’ve been thinking about me,” I said, not meaning it as a joke but she laughed, a bit theatrically. “What are you asking?”
She calibrated the dynamics of a possible power shift. “I’m wondering . . . I thought maybe . . . we might give it another . . . get together now and then . . . maybe date.”
“Date?”
“I miss seeing you. We had some good things.”
I chewed on those words like gristle. “I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Think as long as you need. Not too long.” She tilted her head and raised an eyelid, a meme for I’m teasing but we know how you dither. Teasing, she believed, was one of her major talents and it was, as usual, annoying and annoyingly sexy.
Here I am this lazy Saturday afternoon in late spring, lying on the deck chair, eyes closed, my face under the heavy hand of the sun, forging white-hot new thoughts. (Ha.) My thinking hasn’t been for naught. I had a realization so obvious I might have seen it earlier. I got hung up on date, when maybe is the hook. Her maybe (there’s something better out there). My maybe (it won’t work). My heart beats; listen to the ambivalence: yes/no, call/not, miss/match. I need to act, but what’s the hurry? There is no hurry. As I lie here, something refreshing is happening; a breeze flutters the leaves of the apple tree. The heat wave has overstayed its welcome and the fog must be coming in. If I opened my eyes I bet I’d see tentacles reaching around the bridge. (What a great bridge.) I remind myself not to complain tomorrow how cold it is.
This, too, has happened: the unkind inner voice that blamed me for our breakup, proposing that it was somehow my fault, regardless of evidence, has quieted down. It may be a false calm but it’s acceptable, delightful even.
It is life that, little by little, case by case, enables us to observe that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but by other powers.
—Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat
There were bees on the apricot and apple trees. Not exactly throngs, but certainly noticeable. A few must have been around every other spring—I’ve always gotten bountiful crops, of apples, anyway—but I don’t remember seeing a single one before. The difference this year was that my next-door neighbor Rita acquired a hive.
“I didn’t know you were doing this,” I said when I found out.
“I didn’t tell any of the neighbors. Nobody needs to know. Imagine if Suzy found out.”
“I’m not Suzy.”
Suzy, who lives on the street above ours, engages with the outdoors as if it’s a haven for terrorists. Over the past five years she has battled stray cats, redwoods, darkness, silence, deer and, most recently, the raccoons that mangle her lawn. In this latest campaign she installed a defense shield, a squadron of motion-activated sprinklers, programmed to blast the nighttime marauders. Recently she had one of her “Secrets of the Universe” luncheons during which (I heard this from Suzy herself) participants cut out images of what they hanker after and pin them on a board. These desires will be fulfilled within a year. Where did the raccoons fit in? I wanted to ask. Maybe you need another board, impaling on it all the things you want to make disappear.
The inevitable, as is its not-so-secret nature, happened. A power outage threw off the timer, and each guest walking up the sidewalk between the boxwood hedges got doused. I don’t know how they accepted this, but the neighborhood has not had this kind of laugh in years.
“You put the hive three feet from my fence,” I said to Rita. “Did you expect me not to notice? Why did you put it there?” I couldn’t come right out and mention my fear of getting stung.
“That corner of the garden gets sun soonest. Bees need warmth to get going, especially on cold damp days, and the sooner you get them up and about the better. Get busy, little bees. Are you worried about getting stung? Unless you do something stupid, you’re not going to.”
What kind of odds were those?
“I’ll tell you why you won’t. The entry to the hive faces away from your garden. Bees fly in a straight line coming and going. Bee line, get it? I’ll have to watch where I walk but that’s probably a good thing. Did you know what I did yesterday? I was walking up to the compost not paying a bit of attention and fell smack on my ass. You might get apricots this year; won’t that be a nice change? You give me bushels and I’ll give you honey, though my mentor says not to expect honey the first year. Marjorie is her name. She’s a lawyer, not my first guess. My only concern is about swarming. Marjorie says it’s avoidable. She hasn’t taught me how yet.”
“Swarming?”
“They outgrow the hive and go looking for new digs.”
“Call Marjorie.”
“You are as bad as Princess Suzy. God, I’m madly in love with my bees. I feel thoroughly involved. I check on them two or three times a day. I talk to them.”
“Am I surprised?”
“I feel a little wicked knowing someday I’m going to steal their honey.”
“Which they will accept with great condescension.”
“They’ll be so pissed. And who wouldn’t be. All that effort—flying three miles, fighting the wind, to collect their wee dram of nectar and pollen to turn it into honey, their insurance against lean times, and then this big smelly dumb creature comes along and swipes it. Get her! Naturally they hate big smelly creatures so if you shower once in a while . . . No, I don’t blame them, but they don’t really need all of it. They make more than they need. I already got a smoker, and a full suit down to the gloves. When I put it on I feel like a nun, and Nature is my Mother Superior. I’ll model it so when you see me in action you won’t have a heart attack.”
She headed for the door to the garage. “Are you limping?” I asked.
“I twisted my knee. I’ll be right back.”
A few minutes later, wearing her habit-on-steroids, she reappeared. It was alarming. I could imagine, however, how pleasant it must feel to be all Velcro-ed in, impervious to furious commotion. She held up something. “This is the smoker.”
“What’s it for?”
“The bees think there’s a fire, so they gorge on honey, to take as much as they can for the trip to a new home. They become less aggressive.”
“How aggressive are they?”
“Not aggressive at all. Only when you’re messing with the hive. They don’t sting you for fun. They die if they sting you. They’re not like wasps.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Now that’s just a dumb question. God, I haven’t been this excited about anything for years. When you’re up to your elbows in apricots, you’ll know who to thank.”
Life lives on life. We all eat and are eaten. When we forget this we cry. When we remember this, we can nourish one another.
—Mahaghosananda
“Some good things . . .” was something else Flora said that had me bent out of shape but it’s perfectly accurate. “Some.” Our garden of earthly delights had the lushness of a Miracle-Gro garden; floriferous in astonishing ways, but riddled with maybes. Is it sustainable? What happened to the earthworms? Will it bear fruit?
Spring moves into summer. Flora and I have had no further contact. There may be contact in the future. Maybe.
Rita is hobbling around on crutches. She had surgery on her knee, and is recovering. I haven’t volunteered to take care of the bees—whatever it is that that entails—and she hasn’t asked. Marjorie has stepped right in. I’m getting the sense that the beekeeping community is a hive in itself, adept at cooperation. Meanwhile seeing Rita anything less than overactive continues to be disconcerting.
She was right about the apricots. The tree is plastered with fuzzy nubs, a profusion so great that even if only a tenth remain to ripeness, I will, as she put it, be up to my elbows. It might have been the bees. It might have been the fact that this was one of those years when everything bloomed its head off. The ceanothus wore mantles of cerulean (the bees went nuts). The Rosa banksiae that every year is demure to the point of invisibility was decked with yellow flowers, (literally decked, so heavy it fell over), more Tallulah Bankhead than Lady Banks. We’ve had a few of these kinds of years lately, and it’s tempting to ask, what does it mean?
It means I should go inside and grab a bowl and pick some raspberries and see if any make it back to the house. It means I shouldn’t think so much. It means that after my raspberry orgy, I should plant the sunflowers sitting in four-inch pots on my deck, which I grew from seed. Bees like sunflowers.
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Dispatches from Faro’s garden have appeared seasonally in The Monthly for more than a decade and were recently published as a collection by Ithuriel’s Spear Press. The book, entitled In Faro’s Garden, A Tour and Some Detours, is available at www.spdbooks.org, Amazon.com and Black Oak Books in Berkeley. R.E. Faro can be reached at farospace@sbcglobal.net. Visit www.infarosgarden.com.
