Tag: bees

Why Don’t Husbands Ever Listen

I’ve been married 22 years and I’ve asked myself this question probably 100 times.  Our first few years of marriage, I worked six days a week in a factory and he worked 5 days a week in a grocery store.  He is a meat cutter by trade.

So, one summer, I was working the next day and he had it off.  He was going to mow grass and burn a brush pile we had.  He had been mowing too close to the edge of our pond, so I told him he shouldn’t get so close.  I had told him many, many times before, but reminded him again.  We were also in a drought long enough that the grass was crunchy.  I told him to hook up the hoses to the spigot outside and run it down close to the fire, in case it got out of hand.

I came home from work that day only to find him sitting in the easy chair with his feet up, watching television.  I was a little irked, thinking he had spent his day doing nothing.  Then he told me why he ended up there.

He was mowing around the pond, when the mower, with him on it, fell in.  He had one knee in the muck, trying to push the mower up and out.  Then after he got the truck and pulled out the mower, he put it away.  Said it needed to dry out.

His next bright idea was to light the brush pile.  As the grass started burning toward the woods in several different places, he had to run uphill, get the hoses, attach them to the spigot and started down with the hose.  It was too short, so he had to run uphill and find buckets to fill.  Then run back and forth filling buckets and throwing it at all the flames threatening the woods.  So, okay, he’s off the hook for today.

The next thing I can think of, is he was going to spray some kind of dust into a yellow jacket nest that made its home on our back porch in the ceiling.  I am a beekeeper, so I told him he should wear my bee helmet, long sleeves, and gloves to do that job.  Next, I see him through the back door with a ball cap and short sleeves on, with some kind of sprayer, on a ladder, reaching up to the hole in the ceiling.  I watch him spray one puff and then the dance was on…Yellow jackets don’t like it when you invade their territory and were flying around his head.  I have never seen his hands move so fast.  I was wishing I was video taping it.

You don’t have to feel bad for him, he only got one sting on his ear.  The next time I looked on the porch, he had a bee helmet, long sleeves and gloves on.  Hmmm…..

And why is it that when he comes home with some fantastic tidbit of information, it is usually something I have been telling him for years…

My Papa’s Acres

My grandfather we called Papa and I loved him very much.  He passed away in his early 50’s when his coal truck went over the side of a mountain because the road fell away.  I was eleven years old.  The funny thing is that his training told the drivers to ride the truck out.  That their chances were better then jumping out.  He panicked and jumped out, rolled and hit his head on a rock.  They drove the truck out of the ravine.  It never even turned over.

I am told that I am a lot like he was.  I have wished through the years that he was beside me giving me his gardening and beekeeping wisdom.

Some of my happiest memories are of being on his three acres.  He had five gardens of vegetables, about 15 apple trees, pear trees, three different colors of cherry trees, plum trees, lots of different nut trees, three colors of raspberry bushes, and three colors of grapes on a big wooden structure, and gooseberries.  When the apples started growing and were big enough to eat, I would climb a tree with the salt shaker and eat green apples with salt.  What a treat!  The whole place was like a wonderland to me.

He started his own seeds in a coal heated workshop.  That workshop was amazing, and still, if I can smell the right oily smell, it takes me right back to that place.  There were, what seemed like, hundreds of cubby holes with all sorts of different shapes and objects.  Jars with screws and metal coffee cans. It was a delight to look through.

He was always trying something different and one year, he planted peanuts…in Ohio.  He preserved cabbages, by pulling them out of the ground with the whole root, turning them upside down and burying them in dirt.  Mid-winter, with lots of snow on the ground, he would go push the snow off and pull that cabbage up, good as new.

He had ducks and chickens. He would kill a couple chickens on Saturday, hang them in the cherry tree and have for Sunday dinner with homemade noodles.  My mother says there was no better meal on the planet then those Sunday dinners.

He was a beekeeper and would get calls to go get bees that were in walls, hanging on trees, etc.  I got into beekeeping and asked my Nana about his old equipment.  She had sold it just six months before I had asked.  She had them for about 20 years after his death and decided to sell them.  Sigh…

This has been a rough year for our family and I don’t know if I’m nostalgic or just thinking of simpler times, but Papa’s acres are a place that my mind likes to rest and stay awhile.