99/08/27
 

A few weeks ago Marlianna asked us to think about thirty seconds in our lives that were special or that we would change if we had the chance. Here is what I wrote on the subject.

Thirty seconds that I’d change if I had the chance.

Interesting question, I thought about it a whole lot, but kept coming up with one conclusion: I like the person I am, and for the most part like the life I have. I am the sum total of all the decisions I’ve made up to this point and all the experiences, good and bad that I’ve had. If I went back in time and changed any decision I made it would change the person I’ve become. I wouldn’t want to do that.

There is thirty seconds that stay with me however.

Three years ago my dad was dying.

He lay in the palliative care ward at Vancouver General Hospital with Liver cancer eating his life. Every day I took my mother in to see him, we’d sit there beside his bed and read our books, we’d talk with him whenever the drugs allowed us to and just be with him. All of us, him included just wishing it would end and dreading it happening.

My father’s death, like the death of any parent, created many endings. When you’re looking at something that large from that close it’s almost impossible to see anything else. So many things were ending in my life that I had forgotten that things could begin.

I am a Beekeeper, like my Uncle and grandfather and great-grandfather before me. It runs in the family like a meandering river, something that god put there for whatever reason, no one knows nor questions. It’s what we do and it’s part of us.

It was Early May and it had been a very cold, long winter. Some of the hives had entered it weak, their survival was questionable and I dreaded what I would find on opening them later in the month. I pictured the empty brood combs, the silence and coldness inside the hives and the rattle of the dried husks of their bodies as they fell in clumps off the frames. I dreaded the emptiness of those hives and the long, tedious rebuilding of them with new bees. I dreaded the unknown and I dreaded the further death I would have to deal with.

One morning I was getting ready to go pick up mom. I walked out of my back door to get in my truck. The sun was shining in the sky and the light seemed subtly different. The breeze was blowing past me holding a scent that I vaguely remembered.

I removed the sweatshirt I was wearing over my tee shirt, and realized that the temperature was just right, the sun met me as I stepped out from my back porch. I looked around and thought that I’d go look at the bees before I left, see if there were any faint stirrings of life to be detected. It was a little early for that yet, but there should be a few crawling out of the entrance at least.

I walked to the back of my property, it takes a few minutes through cedar and fir trees, down a trail I had beaten with uncounted walks to see to them.

I was a hundred feet away when I heard it, and couldn’t believe it at first. I stopped in my tracks in wonder I had never experienced anything like it before.

I could hear the hum from where I stood, a hundred feet away.

I looked toward the white boxes that sit like sentinels along the back edge of my place. They face away, out over an old gravel pit grown thick with all manner of wild plants. I began walking again, wondering,  and from seventy feet the hum was loud, unmistakable and clear, when I got to the hives it was almost deafening.

They were everywhere, each hive was emitting a steady stream of bees into the sunlit world, each hive was as alive and strong, renewed and rejuvenated, the bees were greeting the world and starting their cycle all over again. In front of the hives was a cloud, a moving, darting, cloud of bees finding their way around, following the first faint scents of spring as they had done since prehistoric times.

Experience teaches much, but the heart teaches more. I walked slowly and fearlessly into that cloud of bees that morning. I knew from experience that their sound wasn’t threatening or agitated. I knew from my heart that they were welcoming me with a magic that beekeepers have known in their hearts since man first shared their work. I walked into that cloud and felt them touching me as they flew, I stood there as some landed on me and walked over me, I stood there in the warmth of the sun and their embrace. I stood there and knew that my father was dying, and knew that life would continue, I felt them touch me and speak to me.

I shared their beginning.

After a while the cloud moved away and apart, bees from each hive seeking sources of pollen to feed the young, and nectar to sustain them in the next year. Each one off to find nectar that would sustain it, and sustain the lives of others that would live after it had died. I reluctantly knew that it was time for me to go to my father. I wiped away a tear as I moved away, I looked at it as it lay on my finger. A bee landed, drank from it, and went to its hive.

When my dad died I followed an old tradition from Europe. When there is a death in the family, you hang black crepe` on the hives so the bees can share the mourning.

If I had been thirty seconds sooner or later I’d have missed it