PASSING OF A MASTER
When I was six or seven years old, I hardly remember now,
I used to bicycle through the winding dirt road deep in the country
to his house, a blood-rusted tin roof with leaky rickety front.
A widower, he was then a seventy-year old man. No kids
of his own and hence, not a single grand-child. Yet everyone
in town knew the beekeeper, a grandfather to all them kids.
A snot-green kid, I would take Mama’s cornbread or pumpkin
pie to him on Thanksgivings and Christmas, or in summer I’d
take steamed okra picked from our little Victory garden.
For months, I anxiously awaited these trips, for the clouds of
bees captured me with fear and curiosity, let alone his fist-size
ice-cold blackberries he kept inside his cool earthen cellar.
He would gently hand me a queen cell, and in late autumn
I’d take fat drones to school for show-and-tell. An instant
celebrity, I’d loudmouth my expertise on berries and bees.
A gaunt man, he would pull frames with bare hands and no veil.
In fact, I don’t remember seeing him use a smoker. Instead,
rarely, he’d spray water “to calm his Italian gals down.”
He would tell me the secret of sting medicine: grab some dirt,
roll it in your spit, and rub it where it hurts, a miracle cure
that worked faster than any snake oil I ever known since.
A quiet man, he also taught me other secrets of beekeeping:
give them girls enough room for brood and store, and never
interfere with their romp and roam. Tie up your hands!
“You are not a beekeeper,” he’d insist, “You are a bee-maid,
a monk dedicated to assist them to be what God made them to
be, for they’ve been taking care of themselves for eons.”
Now a beekeeper, I went back to his old shack—-long gone.
Hidden in the weeds, I saw his sunken shed, a collapsed lung.
Yet in the prairie winds, I could hear clouds of his bees, roar.
****When I exchanged a few emails with George a while back, I promised the
bloke to post the above on his passing. The best part of George was his
hell-bent irascibility we all hate to love. It was Liciano yesterday, and
today it is you, George. What a loss. . . .
Yoon
******************************************************
* Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at: *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm *
******************************************************
|