My friend Marko’s mother kept bees - well, more specifically his mother’s father kept bees - in one of those broad Slovene bee houses that looked like hopscotch with a pitched roof. It was a mighty bee house too, said Marko, bright and beautiful and abundant, full of industrious bees happy to live in those painted cubbies none the wiser of the sprawling fields, the darkness of the hornbeams, the occasional sheets of thick summer rain. My mother’s father was a champion of the bees, treated them as extended family, tended to their house with a municipalist’s attention, that house which held pride of place on the land we owned, the grass around it always freshly-cut. Even as a grown man, I can still remember the taste of honey stuck to my fingers mixed with bitter decapitated clover and expired fog, can to this day recall the drone of hundreds of bees singing to me, a child who knew nothing of their language. How gracious they were to us in every way.
My mother’s father taught her how to care for the bees, how to nurture and cater to their vagaries and desires, how to collect the elusive fruits of their labor, how to coax their wax into the shape of candles to be lit only for special celebrations. These acts, said Marko, these simple rituals were what it meant to be my mother, daughter of her father. Then, when my mother was in her forties, her father got sick. He grew frailer and frailer, the bees languishing with him, their hives withering as he was shifted around from different places for people to die. Their wings buzzed with less vigor, their movement becoming slow and dejected. Soon the bee house's paint started to fade and peel as the seasons changed and a life dwindled with life itself. And after my mother’s father left this world, she looked out at the once great beehouse and saw only a maw of grief so potent and so totalizing she put on her mud boots, walked out to the shed, grabbed a canister of gasoline, and set the beehouse aflame with all the bees in it.
That’s how I learned what honey smells like when it burns.
Return to small stories home!