Monday, December 13, 2010
Monday: Fresh Writing
We look back, this week, at a fall story written and submitted for publication. This story was actually accepted by a magazine and we are in revision. 
A bumblebee lifts from a hole in the ground. It rises in an unsteady fashion, as if tethered by an invisible wire. The wings move so fast, the motion cannot be seen but is rather heard as a humming buzz. The creature makes an adjustment and wobble-flies past my shoulder.
I lean back as it gathers direction and speed. Four year old Josephine screams and runs to the back porch and then into the house. She slams the back door so hard the house quivers. Nine-year-old Spencer hides behind me and grips my arm with such intensity, the circulation is cut to my hand.
“Sweetie, my arm,” I say.
“Sorry, Mom,” Spencer says, easing up his grip.
Another bee lifts out of the hole, the same routine all over again and right behind is another.
We stand on wet grass that is overgrown and lush. I don’t mow. Mowing is a man’s job but Spencer is too young. Pretty soon, I tell myself, I’ll have to get a man or a mower or a gardner.
I shake my arm to get the feeling back and Spencer stands on his toes in order to peak over my shoulder.
“Will they sting us?” Spencer asks.
“Are you covered with pollen?” I ask.
“Mom!” he says.
I cup the back of his head with my palm the way I do—a habit that started when he was baby. His head fits my hand perfect and he wiggles a little as if to nestle in. It’s our mother-son habit. Our little peculiarity.
“Sweets,” I say, “bee’s are not interested in you unless you are a flower.”
“That’s not true,” Spencer counters. “Yellow jackets sting.”
“Yellow jackets eat meat. Bubble bees collect pollen. Not the same.”
Two bumblebees return to the hole—lowering their pollen loaded legs to the ground. Spencer hides his face against my arm and I decide to try humor.
“It’s like some kind of bee convention,” I say. “Grand Central Bee Terminal. A super power pollen highway.”
Spencer laughs which is nice because his father—my ex—says I don’t have a sense of humor. I wish he were here to see how it’s not true. I’m funny. I’m hilarious to a nine year old.
“I mean, they don’t even knock on the door and ask before they take up residence here. There is no lease and they don’t pay rent. What is the deal?”
Spencer laughs harder still and I roll my eyes with a great show of being outraged.
Spencer eases from around my side and goes down on one knee to get a closer look at the bee entry and departure point. The hole, if you weren’t looking for it, would be impossible to find. It is no more than the size of a dime with a small rise under the gravel.
“How many live down there?” he asks.
I lift my hands and let them drop my sides. Bee infestation is a man job—like mowing and car maintenance and taking out the trash.
“I have no idea.”
Jo sneaks up behind us and like her brother a moment ago, she hides behind me.
“Are they gone?” she asks.
“No honey,” I say, “but they aren’t going to bother you. They want flowers not little girls.”
I put my arm around Jo and she wears a silky pink dress over a yellow silk dress over a neon green silk dress. She simply cannot bear to leave one of her princess dresses on a hanger so they are all on her body in layers. Under the dresses, she wears every pair of underwear too. I am thinking she might have been a refugee in a past life.
Two more bumblebees hover around the trunk of the red oak tree—unsure about a small boy so close to their landing strip. I tap Spencer and point up towards the incoming bees.
On his knees, Spencer isn’t sure what I’m trying to say and he moves his head all around on his neck. He looks like a dog down there on all fours. When he spots the hovering bees, which are lowering themselves to their home, he makes a yelp sound. In a flash, both kids run back to the house and it’s just me, on the wet grass.
~
I’ve been on my own for nearly a year. Fall, winter, spring and now summer. It’s good, it’s right, it’s the best thing for me, for my former husband and for the kids—who didn’t deserve to grow up in a home where the big people argued all the time but it’s surprising how many things I delegated to my husband. I just didn’t have time or interest in infrastructure. If a wire shorted out or a pipe got clogged or the car needed oil—he was the Go-To guy.
If he were here now, he would, without question, have a solution. He would just kill them by dousing the nest with a hose. That’s how his own father, a Nebraska man with a cattle ranching legacy, would have managed such a pesky situation. Heck, I wouldn’t even have been consulted.
But here I am, single—a single mother—and this is what I would call an “infrastructure” issue. I am now the Go-To Girl.
~
One of my friends, married to an abusive man, suggests I put a bucket over the hole. She says the bees will likely just move on or die. When things get bad in her marriage, she takes to her bed and hides under the covers for days. She tells her kids that she is sick but she’s not. She’s just depressed.
Another one of my friends, more like an acquaintance, says I should just get some bug spray and let the bees have it. That’s what she would do. I have no idea how her marriage is going. We aren’t that close.
I have another friend, married to a cop who works the swing shift (meaning she never sees him), and she says that the best way to remove the bees is to go out—late at night—and simply ask them in a firm and yet loving voice.
“I do this all the time with sugar ants,” she says. “And you know what, they just skitter away.”
This woman has recently launched a practice as a clairvoyant. She says she can see your aura.
~
For the next few days, I make it a daily practice to study the industry of the bumblebees. After the kids are fed and taken to school, I sit on the bottom step of the back porch, just a few feet south of the nest in the earth and with my elbows on my knees, watch bees lift off, fly over to the hydrangea and beyond and then return.
Bumblebees, according to the law of aerodynamics, are not supposed to fly. The body is the issue—it’s just too big for those tiny wings. And yet, there they go—over and over again. Apparently this is about wing speed. They are the hummingbirds of the insect kingdom. A bumblebee, therefore, defies logic and science.
~
The new man in my life doesn’t mow, or fix pipes or change the oil. He is Buddha. I have become a student of Tibetan Buddhist studies and I even meditate every day. There is a hum sound to my quiet time—rocking forward and back—accumulating mantra for the benefit of all (which includes bees).
In early Christian traditions, monks lived in beehive shaped huts, which represented the aim of a harmonious community.
While my former husband mocks my interest in spirit, reminding me I have never been spiritual in all the angry years we spent together, I remain focused. Without the constraints of our marriage tethering me to tradition, I absorb all there is to know about these pre-Christ mysteries. I am specifically intrigued by entire sector devoted to the enlightened feminine. Single and artistic women, in eleventh century Buddhism, apparently carried all the mystic teachings of transformation. As patriarchy took over the texts, these women were purged from the re-write of history but I have heard—from gurus who live in Tibet—that women are very easy to enlighten. This has something to do with the cyclical nature of the feminine body. I’ve also read that it used to be believed that women—all women—were considered so sacred that they were enlightened even without being taught or practicing meditation.
Perhaps I am something like the bumblebee. Meditation, which is—in part—an effort to transcend the human condition of suffering, defies reason and aerodynamics. According to a book I read, Power verses Force by David Hawkins, less than half a percent of the human population will achieve transcendent states like pure love. Hawkins also writes that we, as a species, are stuck in the age of reason meaning that every problem can be rationalized or explained via the mind. Yet, when one transcends to higher states like love, joy and enlightenment, reason and logic no longer apply.
~
“Whatcha doing?” Spencer asks.
He stands at the threshold of the back door and holds a mug in his hand. Hot chocolate. The mug reads I Love You.
I’m on the bottom step of the back porch with my coffee. There is no message on my mug.
“Just watching the bees,” I say.
Spencer pads across the porch and down the steps. He sits on the bottom step and sips at his cocoa. His bare toes move in the overgrown grass. Over the rim of the mug, Spence eyes the hole in the ground. Several bees lift off and fly away.
“They are still here,” he says.
“Indeed,” I say.
A gray squirrel jumps from the roof of the garage and into the red oak tree—this breath holding leap. Spencer points.
“A squirrel is just a rat with a good PR campaign,” he says, a joke he’s heard from his dad and which is actually pretty funny.
“A squirrel is just a rat with a better outfit,” I counter and Spencer sputters chocolate in a dramatic spray.
“Oh that’s good,” he says using the back of his hand to wipe is mouth.
The squirrel disappears on the other side of the fence and a few bees land on the ground and drop out of sight. I have no idea how many bees live there, how deep their nest goes or what they are creating in their dark world but I like to imagine them down there—humming around—following their ancient code.
“Have you decided what to do about them?” Spencer asks. He sets the mug on the step and leans into my side. I put my arm around his lean little boy body. He smells like chocolate and shampoo.
“Obviously not,” I say. “They are still with us.”
“Well, that’s a decision,” Spencer says.
My son has a narrow face with dark eyes that are so open and trusting. His dark shining hair is thick and shaped in that popular bowl cut style.
“I guess you’re right,” I say. “It’s the decision to do nothing.”
He leans against my shoulder again.
“That’s probably fine,” he says, “they aren’t bothering us.”
I move my hand over the back of his head to find that place where my palm fits so well. He moves his head a little in my hand, as if to nestle in.
1 Comments:
I love this! Bumblebees are sacred to me; fuzzy, fat, flying teddy bears. The ones in my yard in Portland have a yellow circle on their rear-ends, like a bull's eye! Every time I see one, I think of the Creator's playful sense of humor. I hadn't thought of linking the way they defy logic and aerodynamic laws to meditation. Perfect analogy--another symbol for my own spiritual practice. Thank you for this.
~Kate
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