Barf

"Name's Barf. I'm a mog. Half-man. Half-dog. I'm my own best friend."
Spaceballs, the Movie

Always on the couch. The new couch. My first piece of grown-up furniture (“grown-up” equals not a hand-me-down and not purchased from a second-hand shop). It’s as if the mishaps of the universe are intentionally directed toward the nicest furniture.

Not even a week after the couch was delivered, we had a wine scare. Erika. On couch with red wine in hand. Bela, excited by a new person in the house. Jumps on Erika. Wine spills on couch. I must proudly admit, I could have gone into convulsions on the floor, but I kept it together. Some warm water vinegar, and a whole lot of salt later, the stain was miraculously gone. Disaster averted. Friendship with Erika maintained. Dogs banned from sitting on the couch. (They ignore this rule when we are out).

Last night, it was barf.

And not just your average barf. Bee barf. Let me explain.

About a week ago, Tom, our friendly bee-keeper came to check out our hive. It is doing wonderfully. It is so healthy in fact that we may have to divide the hive into two and re-queen the original. Lots of new baby bees in there. Also, lots of honey and beeswax.

Tom scraped the frames and left pieces of beeswax in the grass. Neat! You can pick up the pieces, pocked with honeycomb chambers. They smell like honey, of course. Lovely evidence of the ingenuity of insects.

Bela obviously appreciated the bees' hard work too, because she ate the beeswax. How do I know? We came home last night to piles of oddly chunky barf. Imagine melting your favorite Crayola crayons (in maize, gray and sepia tones), letting them harden, and then cracking the wax into hundreds of tiny bits. That’s what the barf looked like. And the dead give away...there were dead bees in it.

She bee-barfed her way from the couch to the oriental rug, catching the hand-crocheted afghan in between.

The dogs are now banned from the living room altogether. I vow to never spend another evening daubing at the couch.

The experience and my reaction to it is proof that I have entered the adult world. Now I know why my mother was such a freak about the furniture, the cabinets, the rugs, curtains, pillows and everything else. I hear her voice when I scream, “Good god! Can’t I have anything nice around here?!”