Foulbrood and queenless

Here's an update on the beehive from our beeman, Tom.

Hey Tony and Pam,

Yes, your observations are correct. One western super was removed and the honey was consolidated in the remaining one for stores for the winter. The hive is healthy but not as vigorous as I had expected. I havested only four frames of honey. The production for all the hives is down to only a third of what last year offered up. Kind of sad, plus I'm very sure that Janis's hive has foulbrood and will soon need to be destroyed. Its really an awful bacterial disease, plus I think her hive is also Queenless in the process, but it makes little difference when death is imminent. I hope all is well with you both. I'm not sure when extraction is going to take place but I wil keep you informed.........Tomas

Writing

I am here on the Oregon coast for a writing retreat. This is the first time I've connected to the world in two days. Writing is hard and lonely. I've been eating alot of junk, pacing around the room, drinking coffee, tea, wine, beer. My back hurts. I have a headache that begins in my right temple and ends behind my eye.

Men and Women in Key West isn't finished yet. I should have taken Harley Davidson's question to heart when I first read his comment...because it cuts to the heart of the problem...what is the resolution to the story? Did the narrator break up with Carlos? Did she marry him? What happened? It's a strong piece. My readers here have had intense reactions. But it's not done. Huh. Who knew?

Small House is just the beginning of what will be a much longer piece. I've been working on that most of the time I've been here, and it's hard. It's going into some deep emotional shit. But little bits of beautiful inspiration have come at important moments. I spent Thursday just free writing...blabbing my memories on the page with no shape. I went to sleep and woke up the next morning with the image of the staircase in my head, and then remembered pulling up the carpet when we moved in. I love it when that happens. I'm going home at the end of October to work more on it. I want to be there, to look at the house, walk around the streets where I used to walk. I think there's a whole book there in that little house.

It rained all day yesterday which kept me inside working. It's dry today and the beach is close by. My room overlooks a well-groomed golf course, and men in baseball caps and khaki shorts keep driving by in white-canopied golf carts. It's going to be hard to stay inside with the sun and ocean calling me out, and the stupid little men swinging their clubs around in my line of vision.

Small house

When we moved into the house, the first thing my mother did was pull up the old shag carpet. It came up easy to reveal smooth, oak hardwoods underneath. We swept up the carpet tacks and the years of dirt that had filtered down through the fibers to form a grainy sediment. The carpet backing had acted as a fine sieve, only letting the finest particles through.

It was a small house, but there was room enough for the three of us. It had a tiny pink kitchen with a pink push-button stove. A narrow staircase led to the second floor where there were three small bedrooms. My mother’s was the largest, and my brother’s and mine were exactly the same size, both with a ceiling on one end that followed the steep slope of roof above. Even though there was only a short stretch of hallway in between them, sometimes it seemed that my mother’s room was miles away.

I was a kid who wanted to exist below the radar. I had good grades and a bookish nature. My teachers liked me and I had friends, so there was little to worry about, especially in comparison to my brother, who kept getting into trouble at school. He took more of my mother’s energy. Sitting each night at the dining room table, struggling to get my brother to do his school assignments, her own college books piled on one end of the table and a mass of bills and receipts before her, she had little time for me.

But it was easier for me without my mother’s attention. So much so, that when I spent time at my friends’ houses I bristled to be around their parents. My friend Nicole, especially. When I was at her house, I felt uncomfortable until we escaped to her bedroom to listen to tapes and read magazines. Her mother stayed home during the day, and every evening her father would walk in the door and they would eat dinner together at exactly 4:30. Her mother would place neat piles of freshly laundered clothes on the foot of her bed. Nicole would ask her mom if she could go out that night. I thought, “Why bother asking?” Sometimes her parents would make her stay in, or ask her to be home by nine. My mother was just leaving the house by then, her friends pulling in the driveway ready to go out dancing. I didn’t ask to leave the house, I just went.

So on New Years’ Eve 1989, I expected my mother to be gone. She had arranged for my brother to sleep at a friend’s house, and had plans to go out with her new boyfriend. But by eight that night, she was taking off her smart red shirt dress and black heels, washing the makeup off her face, taking off the gold, braided hoop earrings, and putting on her pink bathrobe. From my room down the hall, I heard her crying.

I walked quietly to her door, and stood on the edge of the rose-colored rug. She was laying on the edge of her bed, with its large dark spindled frame that had to be arranged at an angle just so it would fit in the room. The matching dresser took up most of one wall, and a giant, heavy-framed mirror hung over it. I could see her back, reflected in its surface. She was breathing deeply, her head tucked into her chest and arms wrapped tight around her sides.

“Mom?” She didn’t answer. “Mom, I invited some friends over tonight. They’ll be here soon.”

“Shit,” she said. She got up quickly and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She was running the water in the sink, and opening bathroom cabinets, banging their doors closed again. I heard her sharp footsteps across the tiles. The doorbell rang, and I went down the stairs to answer it. From the window on the landing, I could see Nicole’s parents pulling out of the driveway, dressed up for a new year’s party.

Nicole was there, and so was Gail, and ten minutes later, Seth and Erick arrived. They had a liter of Coke, potato chips, and a bag of M&Ms. We all crowded into the little t.v. room, Gail and Seth on the loveseat, and everyone else sprawled on the blue rug to watch a movie. I left my friends who were making rude noises and loud, stupid jokes to get glasses and ice for the Coke. The ice clinked, the floorboards creaked under my feet in the small kitchen, my friends turned the volume up on the television. I knew every noise was making its way up through the ceiling to where my mother was likely weeping.

She stayed upstairs all night in her room, maybe making a feeble attempt to watch Dick Clark, or maybe just listening to me and my friends. I knew she was trapped there, but I wanted her to stay out of sight. But just before midnight, she came down the stairs and went into the kitchen. She was still in her robe.

“Your mom is home?” asked Gail.

My mom appeared in the doorway. She had a stack of plastic cups and a bottle of champagne in her hands. “It’s almost 1990,” she said, and looked around the room at us. My friends were quiet. No one answered her. So she said, “Let’s have a toast.” She handed us each a cup, and popped open the champagne. She poured a small amount into every glass.

I sat there and just stared at her. Her hair was a mess. She looked tired. I didn’t want to know this lonely woman in her pink bathrobe. I had let others in to witness the look on her face, the same one I saw from the stairs when she thought I had long fallen asleep, and sat tucked in the corner of the couch listening to the same song over and over again. A tiny fragile thing, she was thinking of my father and where it all went wrong. The look that made me want to blow the roof off the place, shatter the windows and tear down the walls. Throw her out into the cold and walk the other way. The look that made me feel it was up to me to keep this place together. I wanted to wrap her up in a little package, bundle her tight and place her in a drawer or cupboard to hide her away where others couldn’t hurt her. Where she would be safe.

“Happy New Year, everyone,” she said, the tone of her voice strained into false gaiety. And then she disappeared upstairs again, leaving us to sip our champagne.

My friends’ parents pulled up shortly after midnight to pick them up. The house was quiet, and I made sure to sweep up the potato chip crumbs and stray M&Ms from the floor. My mother’s room was dark when I went upstairs, but I could heard her shifting positions under her covers as I got into my bed. I settled into place too, and drifted down into sleep.

The driveway

In winter, Gail’s mom would be outside in her red, knit hat, shoveling the driveway, even for only a quarter-inch of snow. She used a curved metal shovel to scrape along the driveway, getting right down to the surface, leaving it clean. Deep black against cold white, it clearly marked where our yard ended and theirs began.

In the summer, the driveway would be meticulously re-blacktopped and sealed. It ran in between our houses, hollyhocks and evergreen shrubs lining it on our side, and wild mint volunteering on their side, next to their side door. From my bedroom window, I looked across the driveway, to the mustard-yellow house. At night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I would watch her mother through their kitchen window, doing the dishes, answering the phone, getting a bowl of ice cream. I’d see the upstairs bathroom light flick on and then off again, and then her dad would lumber down the stairs, past the window at the landing. Her older brother’s window usually remained dark.

Gail’s own room was on the other side of the house, but I would wait to catch a glimpse of her through the window on the landing of the stairs, padding up to bed. Sometimes, she would hear me calling her name, and she would come to the window. We would whisper across the divide. "What are you doing? Nothing. Do you want to do something tomorrow? " We imagined we could string two cans together on a length of wire, or rig a little bell so that we would know when the other was calling.

One August night, we slept out on the driveway, watching for shooting stars. There were too many street lights drowning out the stars in the sky, so we watched cars pass by instead. Tucked inside our sleeping bags we played word games and told stories, naming the mosquitoes that buzzed around our heads. Somehow we managed to sleep all night on the hard surface and woke early when the sun made its way down between the two houses, and the chill of the morning dew made it impossible to doze. When we woke, we were different people. We were no longer friends, because we knew too much about each other.

I would still wait at my window each night, but she would never come. I would think about our plan to string a wire across the divide, a line straight from my heart to hers, now disconnected. I was casting without catching anything, slack and searching.

Later that summer, I woke one morning in my own bed to the sound of voices coming from the driveway below. It was Gail and two others I recognized, Ryan and Sarah. They were just waking up too, or perhaps they had been up all night. I stayed there under the covers and listened to them talk, their voices raspy with the moist air. I knew I had to get up, go to the bathroom, make my breakfast, ride my bike uptown and pretend it didn’t matter she had left me out. I had to pretend that I hardly noticed I didn’t exist anymore. I had to pretend that I was just another neighbor, living in the house next-door.