Swarm

Akin to the end-of-year concert that we couldn’t bring ourselves to attend, the research paper that was never going to materialize, and the spring baseball league that fell prey to more conflicts and rain-outs than games played, the season reveals itself from under the last-to-remain patch of gray sludge as if to taunt,

“I knew you wouldn’t be ready.”

I was almost ready.

With each year of beekeeping—and this is the sixth—I feel a bit more comfortable with what I have learned, and a bit more uncomfortable with what I do not yet understand.

I feel the years settling in my bones.

They hurt you so hard.

We stand here, unaware of the shadows, blistered from the sun.

The last one is starting middle school next year. I think of my own anxiety at eleven and what I had to hold onto to keep walking through those doors. It’s different for all of us. It all is. Somehow, though, we get up.

How can I hold your light when I disappear into the dark, twisted in the rope tied to nothing?

I was right there. I was standing in the middle of the tens of thousands of bees as they poured from the hive. Still, I didn’t get them.

If you drive past the farm, you might see one of the swarm traps—probably the green one placed near the road—intended to be a destination or, at least, a resting place if one of my hives was to swarm. I hoped—maybe even expected—to find my bees here when I returned from lunch that day.

The bees had chosen one of the young apple trees. It was a good size swarm, and as I watched them settle, I planned to capture them after having lunch with my son. Even as we ate at the new Venezuelan restaurant in town, I plotted my capture and thought of what equipment I might need.

We have tried all these years—doing the best we could with what we knew and with what we have been given. It’s not always enough.

The bees were gone from that apple tree. I checked all four of the swarm traps that had been given a fresh spray of lemongrass oil just the day before. They were all vacant.

Sometimes it’s the anxiety that keeps us from being part of the crowd. Sometimes it’s the erratic behavior that keeps us from belonging. Sometimes, it’s the deep-inside fear that tells us it’s just too much—the familiar echo of voices that turned us away more times than we can remember. Sometimes, we just can’t. And sometimes, we like it that way. We have been to the other side, and we know.

I didn’t want to lose that swarm, but I did. I don’t want their childhoods to be over before they are able to feel how deeply we love them. I want them to have long days without hard stuff—where they are truly happy and fulfilled.

Two days later, my beekeeper son helped me catch two swarms. We housed them and went to sleep.

In the morning, there was just one. One small colony that has grown and flourished.

I don’t want them to go. Ever. But when they do, because I know they will, I hope they remember that it was never the Spring Sing that taught me what I needed to know. I really didn’t want to go. Rather, it was the way you took flight in your own direction whether I was ready or not.