Daily Archives: August 30, 2011

Bees, Garden

Harvest Home

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Lughnasa                                                 Waxing Harvest Moon

Tomorrow the season’s honey harvest.  Kate and I will haul out the extractor, fasten it to the deck and begin uncapping our honey.

The process goes like this.  Each colony with surplus honey, 2 & 3, has at least two full honey supers and a third with some honey.  The bees have to be removed from the super, then the super covered with a bee tight lid.

The super goes in a wheel barrow and gets trundled to the deck.  Kate will uncap the frames by sliding a hot knife over the capped cells.  This is a sticky process, one that had several uninvited guests last year, but we’re taking steps to keep the bees away from the extraction.

In the first place we’ll only have one extractor load of frames at a time (6).  That means there will not be frames sitting free, inviting bees.  If we can, we will do the uncapping inside, further removing a source of attraction.

At any rate bees away from their queen are not defensive, so even if they do show up they’re not inclined to sting unless harmed.

Tomorrow’s work completes a journey begun two weeks late, at the very end of April and the beginning of May with three, three pound boxes of bees.

(6 frames go in the slots.  The motor turns the frames and centrifugal force extracts the honey)

Colony 1, which will over winter, has no surplus honey, and I have yet to determine if it has adequate stores.  That will come in the days after the extraction.

If my estimates are correct, we’re going to have a large harvest (for Artemis Hives).

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories

Fall-ing

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Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

As August slides away and the sky shifts its colors toward deeper hues, an inner barometer detects higher emotional pressures.  The atmosphere weighs more, cuing those momentary pauses, breaks in attention.  It may signal a storm ahead, but more likely the prediction carries gray skies and mist, perhaps early morning fog.

Melancholy comes calling this time of year, an acquaintance, maybe a friend, of long standing.  Mom died in October, 1964, 47 years ago, a year longer than she lived.

Her death came at different moments in life for all of us.  Mark, 5 at her death, has few memories of her; she lingers in his past as a faint spirit, an enigma.  Mary, 12, has more, a young girl heading into adolescence, becoming a woman, missed the guidance a mature woman could give as she made that critical transition.  At 17 my life had already begun to pull away from the family, in my senior year of high school, the last, college plans in the making, I had her longest of all, only a brief time less than Dad.

When that dark angel comes, and he comes for us all, finality is the hardest lesson to absorb.  No more mom.  No more.  Memories, yes, but memories fade and change as life goes on and here all three of us are, 47 years later.  47 years.  A lifetime.

Why a friend?  How could melancholy be a friend?  Well, in this way.  As life patters on, this event following the other, we can become accustomed to its rhythms, lost in its small decisions and its casual absorption of our energy.  So lost, in fact, that we forget the Self that carries us forward, the Self into which we live and which lives itself into us.

Melancholy can turn us away from the day to day and cause us again to walk down the stairs leading to what Ira Progoff calls the Inner Cathedral.  We often forget this quiet place within, our own sanctuary, and melancholy can call us to visit it again.

So, yes, melancholy can be a friend of the Self, a guide back into the depths and resources of your Self.

Art and Culture

A Stroll Down Memory’s Lane

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Harvest Moon

Took a stroll down St. Paul’s living museum on Monday.  That’s the way Emily Shapiro characterized Summit Avenue, the western end of it that turns sharply, avoiding Ramsey Hill and heads off toward the state capitol.

We visited the first SPA building (complete with a bronze sculpture of a young Fitzgerald), learned about Tudorbethan architecture, found Hale park complete with a D.A.R. sponsored statue of Nathan Hale (hands tied behind his back), saw Marcia Rinek’s early home near the Louis Hill house and an August Gauden Eagle in Lookout Park.

There is, too, a chainsaw sculpture of an ancient burr oak, right across the street from the University Club.  Emily has information identifying it as a prominent madame of early St. Paul.

Seeing, truly seeing, is one of the gifts that close attention to art nurtures.   We all walked this familiar area, driven past many times, but this time we stopped, looked and listened.

 

Family, Travel

All Visas All the Time

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Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

Visas.  All visas all the time.  Got a fluttery batch of e-mails and phone messages, all received after Travisa’s office’s had closed.  OMG.  We won’t get the documents to you in time.  OMG. Solved by reminding them that we sail on Oct. 16th, not Sept. 16th.  Oh.  All better now.

Mark and Saudi Arabia.  A police clearance popped up as a new piece of paper.  How to get it?  Lots of opinions.  FBI background check?  BCI state level clearance.  Will this torpedo the application?  Looked like it for awhile, then a phone, again, to Travisa in D.C.

A local police clearance?  Plenty good enough.  Mark now has a Good Neighbor certificate from the Anoka County Sheriff stating that he has committed no crime since he got here.  Good to know.

In in the interim Mark had discovered that the Saudi Embassy closed this week to celebrate Eid, the end of Ramadan.  But. Travisa again.  Nope.  We can get it done in time.  Send us the material by Friday and we’ll get it done.

A series of this’s and that’s, frustrating, but not impossible.

International travel, all fun, all the time.