Bees.
Once in a while I take a little spoon of honey for my tea. Sometimes I indulge in walnuts with honey.
It’s been now more than ten years since he passed away, out of the blue. Heart attack on a beautiful and sunny spring day. No one saw it coming, we all thought grandma would go first. She was the one with heart problems, diabetes and then some. She’s still alive. Not great anymore, but still alive.
But before he went, as never before, he made honey. A lot of honey. Honey to last us for decades. We shared it with friends, it went around as nice gifts, sometimes as sweet bribes. All those years before, grandma would always tell him: what a waste these insects! They take all your time and eat all our sugar to survive, but give no honey in return. How did they know when it was time to make up for those years?
He had a special love for the bees. The kind that one just has within. He learned how to go about bees on his own: by reading, by observing, by doing, and by suffering. No one in the family inherited his passion. It stopped with him. The bees moved across the street to the young neighbour, he took them together with their houses. Their relocation went smooth. I wonder if they noticed he was gone?
I still have a bit of honey in my jar. I should get some more when I visit my mom.
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