Really quite pleasant

Rebecca's bees, photo: Kora Kirby

Sunday was such a pleasant day, so pleasant in the way that our friend Pierre uses the word.  Really quite pleasant, he is fond of saying about places, about people, particularly people my parents aren't wild about.  My mother will say something particularly barbed (we're so good at that in my family), and Pierre will respond, "Oh I don't know, Sarita, I thought she was really quite pleasant," the perfect antidote, the balancing phrase that settles the energy.  Once Joe and I were driving him home from the ballet, Pierre in the back seat telling stories about one time when he was in Haiti and there was a coup and he fled to some place high up in the mountains where it was, yes, really quite pleasant.  

Sunday was just such a day.  Really quite pleasant.

Joe was up and out of the house early for a 7am ride, no slug-a-beds in this house.  I wrote for a while, then Burns and I rambled in the hills, an hour or so of sailing along trails (me), crashing through brush (him), checking out banana slugs (both) and chasing turkeys (him).  It was delightful.  From there it was shower and change and pack up beekeeping things.  I went for brunch with Kora, my old friend Scott's daughter here visiting from England, then to Rebecca's house with Kora in tow, to tend bees, assist her in possibly making splits from her hives, something I've never done, something I want to learn.

First off, I have to say here that Kora is truly a delightful person, of whom her parents should be so proud.  She has always been unusual -- and I mean that in the very best sense -- in that she has always been so thoroughly and unequivocally herself and no one else.  I probably met her when she was a baby.  Yes, I did meet her when she was very little, when she and her parents were visiting from Berlin and I brought The Kid to meet them at a playground in the City.  But really I feel like we became friends, actually, around the time of her 18th birthday, when I was invited to attend her first tattoo.  I suppose for people like us, these are the rituals, the rites of passage we create: the pleasure of your company, of your witness and support, at my first tattoo, is requested.  And it's true that deeply, Kora is family to me.  Her father and I have been friends since we were 13 years old, standing in the outfield in the yard at Everett Junior High, retelling bits of the night before's Monty Python to each other and snickering about crunchy frog as the ball arced over our heads and rolled off into the weeds, totally ignoring the screaming of our classmates and the teacher, too involved in our own laughing to give a shit.  

Kora never seemed the kind of teenager who is blowing this way and that, trying to figure out who she is.  It's as if she arrived with all of those questions answered, complete.  I've never met anyone like her, really, in all my long life -- she's a treasure, really, that Kora.  She is on track to make great things happen in the world.

Really quite pleasant. 

And then we went to Rebecca's.

Truly keeping bees has been a huge boon in my life.  And not just for the bees.  Although I can't under-sell, over-extoll, how great the bees themselves are, how time spent as we did on Sunday, slowly, methodically pulling out frames and examining bees, looking for and not finding the queen, though traces of her (eggs, larvae, capped brood) are everywhere, that time is dream-time. And to be able to share that experience with someone as great and funny and gorgeous as Rebecca just puts the whole thing over the top completely.  I left there smelling of smoke and beaming, heart big and juicy from the friendships that bees have brought me, with people like Rebecca and her ridiculously awesome kids and her husband. OK, two stings, too, but that's nothing.

There was a point in our bee-tending when I became aware of how many bees were in the air around us, one large mass of them on the side of Rebecca's pants.  By this time, all of the spectators to our actions were gone.  It was a bit windy, not ideal conditions, but whatever, sometimes you just have to go in even if the weather could be better.  Rebecca and I had been talking, talking, pulling frames, turning them around, looking at both sides, checking for eggs, looking for queen cells, deep, deep inside our experience in an easy companionable chatty cozy girlfriendy kind of way. And then I heard it suddenly.  It'd been going on all along, that hum of the bees all around our heads, but I'd been unaware until that moment.  Jesus, that was a lot of bees.  A lot.  It's possible that at that precise moment the mood in the bees changed, which is why I suddenly noticed.  I think it was around that time I got the two stings.  We popped out of the dream a bit, decided there were no splits to be made, closed up that hive and de-bee'ed ourselves.  And sat around and talked for a while more, in the sun.

Buzzy, dreamy hivemind.

When I got home to Joe, I chattered on and on about my day, my day which was, in some ways, so very uneventful.  Really I just hung out with people all day and did my usual things: drank coffee, ate, geeked out on bees.  But I was so completely, 100% happy, that I couldn't stop talking about it, re-telling remarkable things Kora had said, great things I learned from Rebecca. Chattering. Happy.

I felt just so full of the goodness of my simple little life, of buzzing from place to place, picking up nectar here, toting home pollen from there, gathering all that beauty and bringing it home to my hive, to make it into honey here and then savor it like the food it really is.  A Sunday like that Sunday does nourish me for days and days, subsisting not on memory so much as on the feeling of it, everything suffused with love, with that golden light filtered through a frame of honeycomb raised up and turned just so into the sun.  So much goodness in this paradise of a life, so much easy good stuff: friends and love and flowers and bees, a feeling that lasts for days and then, just as it starts to fade, bam, it's the weekend again and time to open the hive, check the stores and refill my own.

Is it any wonder I had such a strong reaction to "The job of an artist is to offer a sanctuary of beauty to an ugly world?"  It's all so simple, so beautiful, so easy and right in front of our noses, sometimes buzzing madly all around our heads if we would just notice...  Forget the job of an artist.  Maybe our job, everybody's, really is to see what's all around us, gather what nectar we can, and just make honey, make something sweet out of whatever you've got.  If you're out of flowers, that's ok, too.  I'll make enough honey for us both.

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