My Million-Dollar Donkey Read online

  I took him to a shady corner of the forest where Mark agreed I could keep the bees. The man grunted, looking about with a shake of his head. “If you want the hive to succeed, the box needs to be out in the open where the sun shines. Somewhere near your garden. Why would you want to hide bees in the forest anyway?”

  “My husband thought it might be safer to keep them out of sight.”

  “Not for the bees,” he said, stepping to the open field and pointing to areas that were good for a beehive. “I take it your husband is not much of a farmer.”

  “He likes the idea of farming, but a practical application of his ideals is not exactly his forte.”

  A change of bee plans would not make Mark happy, but I was about as savvy about bees as I had been about mules, and I admitted I was agriculturally ignorant and tired of wasting money when we did things ‘our way’ instead of the right way, I told the man to set up my bees wherever he thought was best. The Indian drove to the very front of our land, selected a prominent, grassy spot right at the entrance, and wordlessly set up the hive. When this was done, he made his way back to the car to write out a bill, his face a mask of stoic intelligence. For some ridiculous reason, I felt my bees were of better quality than any I might have purchased from a bee farm because an authentic Cherokee delivered them.

  “Don’t forget to feed them.” he said as he started up his truck. “How?”

  He nodded towards the box on the top of the hive. “That thing you have on the top of the hive is a feeder. Just fill the box up with sugar water and the bees will stick to their new digs.”

  “Sure. Okay,” I said, trying to feign confidence. As soon as the dust settled from the Indian’s truck rolling down the lane, I rushed to the house to crank up the Internet. An hour later I returned to the hive with two pounds of sugar diluted with water for that thing on top of my hive, which I now knew was a feeder.

  There didn’t seem to be any sort of bee mutiny going on yet, but I filled the feeder anyway. Bees came and went from the small opening in the front, seemingly happy with their new home.

  Mark was perturbed when he returned to find the bees out in the open, but he wouldn’t dare move the hive, so they remained right where they had been positioned. A new hive of bees pretty much takes care of itself, and since flowers were blooming like gangbusters, there was nothing to do but watch from afar. Having bees was rather anticlimactic until a month later, when the time came to officially check the hive.

  The books said I could handle the bees in jeans and a long sleeve shirt. Gloves and a headpiece are all you truly need to work with bees, and even then, the thick leather fingers of the gloves make it hard to get hold of the closely spaced honey files in the hive. Nevertheless, I decided to slip on my bee suit, partly because I was a nervous newbie and partly because I wanted to pretend I was a big-time beekeeper. A bee suit is really nothing more than a stiff jumpsuit made of canvas. A plastic safari hat with a bride-like veil protected my face. A beekeeper suit looks a little like a spacesuit, truth be told.

  “Take me to your leader,” I said, the first time I put on the suit and gave the family a fashion show. I walked around the living room in slow motion like someone walking on the moon.

  “We could get a suit in your size so you could get up close without risk,” I suggested to Mark. “It’s pretty cool to witness how nature works, and I’m told a honey-filled hive is heavy. You could help me lift and harvest the honey. Beekeeping can be an adventure we share.”

  “No interest.”

  I sighed, then loaded up the car alone. I had a second hive box at the ready in case the bees were ready to expand their living quarters. I also had my trusty bee brush to sweep bees out of the way, a hive tool, and a lighter for the smoker. I figured with the hive only a month old, all the beekeeping paraphernalia was unlikely to be necessary, but I wanted to play with my new toys and the bee suit made me feel serious and infallible.

  I lit up the smoker using pine needles for fuel. Within seconds the pot oozed a heady stream of thick, gray smoke. The hive top was sealed with propolis: a sticky residue bees create to seal their homes. Good! This gave me an excuse to use my hive tool. I pried the lid open and peeked inside feeling ever so professional. A million bees stopped what they were doing, turned around, and stared at me with disdain. Their eyes spoke of raw hatred, I tell ya.

  I reached for the smoker and shot little whiffs of smoke under the lid. Hopping back, I tried not to hyperventilate. Slowly I crept forward and lifted the top again, only to discover the bees had all crawled down into the recesses of the hive. Sigh. That was better.

  I leaned in closer to inspect the frames, staring with wonder at the brood embedded in the new comb. Using the pry end of my trusty hive tool, I lifted the center frame. A hundred bees scurried about eating honey, a natural reaction to the smoke. The frame was shockingly heavy, dripping with sweet amber. I wanted to dip a finger in and get a taste, but the glove and my awkward hold on the frame made that impossible. Gingerly, I set the frame aside.

  I shifted things about to look at the other frames, but rather than do a full inspection, I just peeked at the active frames from above fearing I’d crush the single queen like many dopey inexperienced beginners do.

  I had put together a new hive stand that very morning, so I moved the hive to the ground so I could install the new part and crushed a handful of bees in the process. Oops. When I tried to set up the stand, the box didn’t fit on the concrete blocks, so I ended up putting everything back in place, crushed bees and all. I poured more sugar water into the hive top feeder. This wasn’t necessary, but feeding the bees was the only thing I knew how to do with confidence and I was the kind of girl who always felt feeding her loved ones was a way of nurturing and caring for them.

  I wanted to put an entrance block in front of the hive to keep out honey robbers; however, the entrance was swarming with active, annoyed bees. Apparently, they don’t take kindly to strangers killing their kin. Determined, I tried to put the device in place, but two bees landed on me and tried to sting my arm. Protected by the suit, I brushed them away, grabbed the smoker and puffed in their direction, only to discover my smoker had burned out! The bees were now buzzing louder, no doubt spreading the word that I no longer had a weapon. Quickly, I bent down and stuffed a handful of pine straw into the smoker and squeezed the air vent until more smoke puffed up.

  “Take that,” I said, sending a few extra shots their way. They say bees can sense your attitude, and the most important thing you can do is remain calm and loving when working with bees. Obviously, this particular lesson would take practice for me.

  Satisfied at surviving my first hive check, I put everything back in place, backed away, took off my veil and gloves, and leaned against the car to watch the bees swarming in the air. My hair was sweaty from the bee hat, but a warm breeze blew through my bangs. The bees outnumbered me by the thousands, but having come through a successful first encounter, I felt oddly in tune with them.

  Wildflowers dotted the field around my feet and the blackberry bush was in bloom, as were dandelions and clover. I formerly picked daisies, cosmos, and coneflowers for my table this time of year, but now decided to leave the flowers to their greater purpose. I knew the bees would fly in a two-mile range, and return to this very box to do the famed bee-dance to communicate where each flower was located. Imagining this, I considered my grief over dance disappearing from my life. Perhaps my greatest love had simply been reincarnated, lurking in the background of my existence quietly, in the dance of the bees. Perhaps everything I had been in the past and everything I was learning to be now was fusing, the shadows of one life gently morphing into another.

  I sat there in the field for over an hour wondering how I could possibly describe the poignancy of this moment to my husband. The astounding resonance of this quiet adventure would unfortunately end with me, because some things cannot be shared secondhand despite our d
esire to try. I felt sad for all Mark was missing, sadder still for what I myself was missing as I witnessed the beauty all around me, alone.

  “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”

  —Henry David Thoreau

  HOME CHURCH

  Friends from our former life often asked, “How are the kids coping with the move?”

  “Our kids have never been happier,” I’d say, only to receive a condescending smile, as if I were lying.

  We no longer had access to expensive gymnastic or karate schools promising to develop a young person’s grace or self-discipline. There were no afterschool computer labs or SAT crash courses to enhance a child’s learning capacity, either. We didn’t even have competitive cheerleading squads promising a perfect cartwheel, the key to popularity and a lifetime of success in some circles. As such, friends were convinced our previously popular pop culture kids could never be happy. How could hip people like us live in a backward town without malls, movie theaters, or designer clothing outlets?

  They didn’t get it. Our life had become a great experiment, and collectively, we saw promise and beauty in the simple things that forged togetherness. We dived into family adventure like a starving person would dive into a buffet table.

  We laughed at ourselves as we stumbled through daily country experiences, partially because we didn’t fit in, and partially because we did. There really was very little to do in the country, and because of this, we just hung out. We sat around a fire ring at night and shared dreams, embarrassing moments, and jokes. We went apple picking and tubing down the river. We picked beans from the garden, had snowball fights with the dogs, and dared each other to eat homegrown guinea eggs. When we had no place to go, we brought entertainment home, not a rented video, but things to do, such as making baskets, cartoon drawings, or homemade Christmas ornaments of clay. We ate meals together for the first time in years, and sometimes hopped into the car for a late night treat at the Dairy Queen, a venture made all the more appealing because nothing else was open past six o’clock.

  Our theater of choice was the local drive-in, the trunk of our car packed with thermoses and treats. Our favorite dinner out was a picnic in the park on Thursdays when local bluegrass musicians gave free concerts. We went to festivals, craft fairs, and meandered through the local flea market to pick up antique bottles, socks, and books. We swam in the lake, hiked to see waterfalls, and picked blackberries. Our time together was leisurely and casual, with meaningful conversation cementing our feelings of togetherness. No single event was cause for great enthusiasm, yet the general attitude was that life was good. The lack of constant suburban stimuli forced us to look within ourselves for fulfillment, and the mass-produced products and experiences so carefully designed to make people feel fulfilled seemed anything but fulfilling from this distance.

  “Life here feels like a vacation,” my son once said. Indeed. But as the novelty of family time spent together wore off, my kids chose to spend their free time with new friends. My husband, wanting desperately to be embraced by the local crowd, preferred laughing about country antics with Ronnie rather than talking about the day with me. My new confidant became Kathy. As each member of the family struggled to fit in and become ‘naturalized’ in our new environment, the desire for companionship became a personal challenge each of us chose to solve independently.

  Mark and I worried that our suburb-raised kids wouldn’t be able to relate to their new peers. Here, youngsters were learning to drive a tractor at the same age their former friends were learning to maneuver a skateboard. But the Internet makes the world a smaller place, and even the most countrified kids had a respectable handle on pop culture trends and styles. Some kids were indeed cowboys or farmers in the making, but they knew what bands were popular, what clothing was cool, and they spent enough time on YouTube to keep current with the fast paced culture of the world at large. The kids in Blue Ridge were as comfortable in a barn as at a GameStop, a combination of MTV and Huck Finn influences balancing their lives. They didn’t hang out at the mall. Instead, they went camping, whitewater rafting, and swimming in the lake, all healthy activities that I thrilled to witness my kids trying.

  I suppose the fact that we moved just before my son entered high school made the peer issue less threatening. Kent had had his fill of pop cultural influences and his personality was set. He was definitely going to college and had a broad view of the world. Moving to the country simply gave him a reprieve from the endlessly competitive environment of the rat race, time to redefine his moral and emotional center. He would charge back into the “real world” within four short years, and when he did, he’d be fortified with good memories of family togetherness.

  Denver was an adult, taking a year reprieve from her life path to rebalance and get her bearings. Her time with us wasn’t unlike a college kid taking a year off to backpack Europe before getting that first job, and thereafter taking on a lifetime of mortgages and responsibilities. I trusted she would be fine.

  Our daughter Neva, however, was more of a cause for concern. She was younger; still in her formative years and more apt to be influenced by local attitudes and influences. I loved that she constantly had a chicken under her arm rather than being a slave to fashion and the latest iPod accessories. Neva was a budding environmentalist and animal rights advocate, an avid reader and deep thinker. She was smart, self-reliant, and happy. The problem was the wholesome environment of the country came hand in hand with constant exposure to a narrow mindset, a darker side of the country where ignorance ruled behavior.

  Kids didn’t talk much about religion on Florida’s suburban coastline, but in Blue Ridge, a family was defined by what church they attended. On the first day of school, my kids came home baffled because every student they met opened the conversation with the same question. “What church do you belong to?”

  Kids just didn’t ask that kind of thing in Florida, at least not before asking someone their name or where they got their cool shoes.

  When Kent and Neva innocently commented that our family didn’t belong to a church, they were barraged with hard-sell tactics to attend this church or that one, as if the locals got a commission for each soul they saved.

  “Why didn’t you just tell the kids at school that we don’t go to church?” Mark said.

  “I did. They started calling me a Jew,” Kent said.

  “Did you tell them you aren’t Jewish?”

  “Of course, but they still said things like, ‘Hey Jew, give me a pencil. They aren’t doing it in a mean way. They’re joking...I think.”

  “Is everyone who doesn’t go to church a Jew?” Neva asked innocently.

  Mark and I exchanged a look of chagrin. We may not be big church people, but we obviously were remiss if we hadn’t instilled a basic understanding of religion in child number three. Shame on us.

  “No matter what I say or do, they keep bothering me about what church we’re going to join,” Kent said. “It makes me feel weird.”

  “Me, too. I told everyone we haven’t decided which church to join because we liked our old church in Florida so much. Lying is easier. I don’t want everybody here to hate me because I’m a wicked sinner,” Neva said.

  “You are not a wicked sinner, and you shouldn’t lie to avoid confrontation. A family doesn’t have to be involved in organized religion to be decent and spiritual.”

  “Why don’t we just join a church so they don’t keep bothering us? We don’t have to actually go,” my son suggested.

  “We’re not the sort of people who do things we don’t believe in just to fit in,” I said with enough emphasis to remind everyone that comment applied to much more than just our choice of worship.

  “Easy for you to say,” Kent mumbled. “Once they tag you as godless here, you’re doomed.”

  For a month, we tried to
come up with a comfortable way for our children to thwart the awkward religious grilling they received at school. How could we explain to our offspring that being called a Jew wasn’t an insult, even though in this case the name-calling was clearly meant to be one? How could we explain that a good Christian doesn’t hate gays and blacks and Catholics and anyone else who isn’t a Baptist? How could we convince them that people who drank or cussed or didn’t choose to sit in a steepled building on Sundays were not doomed to hell?

  Finally, Mark came up with a solution. “Next time the kids ask you what church you attend, tell them you’re home-churched.”

  Kent lifted one eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

  “You know how kids are home-schooled around here because the parents don’t trust school to educate them with strong-enough Christian values? Well, tell everyone you are home-churched because your parents believe that is the only way you’ll be taught our family’s deep faith and wisdom. That’ll shut them up.”

  And it did. Our kids became known as the home-churched Hendrys.

  One day Kent mentioned he was going home to Florida to visit relatives. A kid at lunch asked, “Are you taking a gun?”

  Kent laughed. “Why would I take a gun?”

  “To shoot the niggers. You can’t walk the streets down there without niggers jumping you.”

  Kent relayed the conversation, thinking I’d find it funny since the kid had said the stupid comment with absolute seriousness.

  “What did you say to that?” I asked, trying not to grind my teeth to dust.

  “Nothing. That kid’s a stupid redneck. I wasn’t about to tell him some of our friends are black. I’m not stupid!”

  “Do all the kids at school talk like bigots?” I asked, giving Mark one of those we simply can’t raise our kids here if prejudice and ignorance is gonna be the norm kind of looks.

  “Not all. But lots do. Face it, Mom, there are rednecks here. Lots of them. Don’t worry; I hang with the right crowd.”