particular evening, six months and twelve days after they had died, as I sat on my front porch stitching a patch onto the knee of my worn dungarees, I found myself staring into the dying light for impossible signs of activity from within my neighbors’ sealed house when I caught a glimpse of a dark figure standing in the window of the parlor. It was just for an instant, but it was enough to cause me to grip the arms of my chair until I felt the rough wood bite into my palms. I confess I had been having trouble sleeping through the night and so it is possible that I may have dozed off for a moment or two. But whether I did or not is beside the point. I reacted with the same instinctive gasp of horror and pity I invariably feel, if only for a second, when I mistake a shard of blown tire from a distance for the body of a cat that has been thrown to the side of the road by a speeding car. In those unguarded moments of distant perception, what we think we see, real or not, causes us to feel what we do. And once we’ve felt whatever we’ve felt, we can’t take it back.
Claire tried to tell me that more than once. To my regret, I dismissed her emotions as vehemently as she dismissed my empiricism. Perhaps we should have listened to each other more.
I do believe now that I may have been the only one who might have lifted the shroud of pain that cloaked the dark interior of the Straussman house while anyone worth caring about still lived within, but for any number of reasons I did not.
In my own defense, I can only say that Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote that there are three things necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do. Until recently, I thought I knew my mind in this regard, but when I take into account my lifelong connection to the Straussman family I find my personal salvation wanting on all three counts.
Eleven
S WARM: A natural method of honeybee propagation when a collection of bees that includes a healthy queen breaks off from the mother colony to establish a new, independent hive.
B ee fever” is what those of my generation used to call it when a man fell in love with honeybees and got himself his first hive. Strictly speaking, I never had to take the plunge myself, as there have been beehives in our family for at least three generations. I suppose you could say I was born with the fever already aboil in my blood, passed down from father to son, and to son again, and I never had to do any more to stoke the fire of this singular passion than to step outside my back door and observe our bees busying themselves around and about any of the dozens of hives we’d always kept.
Happily, my mother was readily persuaded to share my father’s dispositional affinity for bees. They were wed in June of 1915, directly after my mother graduated from high school and my father was nigh on his twenty-first year. Though bee fever isn’t as common in a woman as a man, neither is it rare enough to seem particularly odd that hardly had their wedding vows been spoken that my mother took to hurrying through her household chores—cooking and cleaning, bustling beyond the norm even among the hardworking farmwives of her day—in order to join my father out at the hives by midafternoon. Together they would fuss and fret over a listless queen one day or fight off an invasion of small brown ants the next.
It seems somehow stranger to me, coming from the bloodlines we did, that my elder sister grew up unaffected by our family’s affection for bees. While she would cheerily confess to a fondness for the fruits of our tireless labor, she found little pain in leaving the hives behind when she chose to marry and move back up the Pacific Coast to where her husband found permanent employment in the shipyards of Washington State.
I suppose my sister was not so much rejecting our parents’ way of life as she was following in my mother’s reverse
Claire tried to tell me that more than once. To my regret, I dismissed her emotions as vehemently as she dismissed my empiricism. Perhaps we should have listened to each other more.
I do believe now that I may have been the only one who might have lifted the shroud of pain that cloaked the dark interior of the Straussman house while anyone worth caring about still lived within, but for any number of reasons I did not.
In my own defense, I can only say that Saint Thomas Aquinas once wrote that there are three things necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do. Until recently, I thought I knew my mind in this regard, but when I take into account my lifelong connection to the Straussman family I find my personal salvation wanting on all three counts.
Eleven
S WARM: A natural method of honeybee propagation when a collection of bees that includes a healthy queen breaks off from the mother colony to establish a new, independent hive.
B ee fever” is what those of my generation used to call it when a man fell in love with honeybees and got himself his first hive. Strictly speaking, I never had to take the plunge myself, as there have been beehives in our family for at least three generations. I suppose you could say I was born with the fever already aboil in my blood, passed down from father to son, and to son again, and I never had to do any more to stoke the fire of this singular passion than to step outside my back door and observe our bees busying themselves around and about any of the dozens of hives we’d always kept.
Happily, my mother was readily persuaded to share my father’s dispositional affinity for bees. They were wed in June of 1915, directly after my mother graduated from high school and my father was nigh on his twenty-first year. Though bee fever isn’t as common in a woman as a man, neither is it rare enough to seem particularly odd that hardly had their wedding vows been spoken that my mother took to hurrying through her household chores—cooking and cleaning, bustling beyond the norm even among the hardworking farmwives of her day—in order to join my father out at the hives by midafternoon. Together they would fuss and fret over a listless queen one day or fight off an invasion of small brown ants the next.
It seems somehow stranger to me, coming from the bloodlines we did, that my elder sister grew up unaffected by our family’s affection for bees. While she would cheerily confess to a fondness for the fruits of our tireless labor, she found little pain in leaving the hives behind when she chose to marry and move back up the Pacific Coast to where her husband found permanent employment in the shipyards of Washington State.
I suppose my sister was not so much rejecting our parents’ way of life as she was following in my mother’s reverse
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