Words out of my mouth this morning over breakfast. No joke.
Pregnancy is not without its indignities. Some, apparently, just aren’t covered in the pamphlets.
————–
Vintage gunslinger baby shorts; ”for boys”, it says, but we know better.
making room
Baby-related imagery has infiltrated my camera roll, throwing off a previously dependable ratio of pets:kitchen:garden.
It was difficult, a few months back, for me to picture a future where she’d be a real person instead of a little fish baby with tail rudiment and eyes on opposite side of her head. I worried about my maternal instinct, and my ability to form a bond with a red-faced, screaming infant. Then I pictured her in kitted baby socks, and the whole mess of instinct locked into place. Socks humanize.
The cat has been spending inordinate amounts of time in our cribs. I could prove my intention to be a good parent by putting an end to this immediately, but enough cute apparently causes a total paralysis of personal accountability.
secret lives of mantids
2011: winter,
spring,
summer,
and fall.
Another wonderful year.
——–
Praying mantids, the carnivorous, ham-handed little things, eat what would eat your radishes and apricots and are thus your accomplices in the garden. Last April we bought an egg case home (walnut sized and papery like a wasp nest) and I wedged it in a persimmon tree per carton instructions. I checked it for weeks for signs that the hundred miniature mantids had emerged (all at once! and leaving no evidence of their escape unless you catch them in the tiny act), but was distracted as the bees came and we went for hikes and and started our family.
In August, I took pictures of a strange and never-before seen kitchen invasion: three or four bright white mantids that arrived in turn to our window sills. Each time it happened, it was a more immediate task to get the pinching things outdoors without harm to us or them than to wonder about the reason or coincidence. It’s only this winter, flipping through my pictures from the year, that I realize those were my mantids, hatched and grown completely beneath my notice.
Our yard must have been full of them all summer, but I was happy with other things and didn’t remember to look for them. They must, as advertised, have grown up and secreted themselves in our fruit trees and tomato cages, won and lost insect wars and sought mantidy destinies. There was so much that I did notice this year, but more still on hand had I just been able to keep in all in mind. What a thing to wish for again.
Building it in
A lament: In a world full of houses with nooks and crannies and clever built-ins, we found ourselves living in the shadow of grave architectural oversight. I love our little wooden house, but the closest we had to an adorable built in was this:
I think you agree that this is not close at all.
Orange-y plywood, varnished within an inch of its life and then abused by renters for a few years just for spite. I’m getting around to the point: if one wants badly enough to be the type who lives in a house with gorgeous old built-ins, there might just be a way.
A few years ago, we met a woman who was de-n00king a beautiful 1940s bungalow in San Leandro. No more built-ins for her — she wanted the sleekness and modernity that only the completely cabinetless wall could offer.
Her minimalist kick was decidedly to our gain: we rented a truck and carried home a beautiful old cabinet that had spent the last 70 years standing by in a sunny little breakfast room off her kitchen. It solidly resents the subsequent two years it spent under a tarp next to our chicken shed, but Bill rescued it this fall and installed it in our guest-room-turned-progeny-containment-unit.
It is extremely true that now we have no closet in the second bedroom. You ask where we will be hanging all our things, and I say there will be just the folding of them and the putting away of them in drawers.
I guess we could get a wardrobe someday. But only if you insist.
Assorted updates from the gestational front
In no particular order.
I cut coffee completely out of my diet, and I have more energy now than when I drank it. I’m sure I’ll go crawling back to it when this phase is done, because coffee is not ultimately about energy at all. I think you know this too.
I didn’t believe I was pregnant at first because I didn’t feel any different.
Rationally, it makes sense—you don’t feel yourself incrementally aging, and your body can be sick, silently, before the onset of symptoms. A strangely erroneous belief of mine: that I could sense what was happening inside, or that my body wouldn’t undertake such a task without signal. As signs appeared, I rationalized them, thinking the parts did not equal a whole of such significance. I believed it thirteen weeks in, when I saw our baby move on the ultrasound screen.
I should say “she”; this baby is a girl.
A related fact which obsesses me these days: by now, she has developed ovaries complete with every last little egg she’ll ever have. My daughter’s genetic contributions to her children are fixed, then, which means that anything I’ve passed along to her I’ve had with me since before I was born. It makes me feel connected with my grandparents and grandchildren, but also distant from my daughter in some ways. At birth, she’s not a product of the things I love about her father and about myself because the most loved things are made rather than given. If she’s to grow up sharp and heartful and resilient, it has still to begin.
Quilting is incomprehensibly difficult. Nobody warned me and now I’m resentful.
We’re due in April, eleven years to the day after Bill and I started dating. Birth scared me at first, but not anymore.
Speaking of reproduction:
Today, I think we should talk about the gender politics of bees. It’s particularly relevant just now, and here’s why:
I call it: Dead Bees on a Porch, and it’s where our story of bee love, lust and betrayal ends.
(That was, by the way, the only bee picture I have on hand so you’re getting Miscellaneous House Interior from here on out)
There are three types of bees: the queen (big, female, runs the show and lays the eggs, only one per hive), the workers (your go-to bees for foraging, baby-raising, honey-making and much more. They’re the ones you see on your begonias, they’re female, they far outnumber others in the hive) and the drones, our gentlemen lovers.
A queen is born just like any other bee in the hive. But from the very beginning of her life, she is fed royal jelly by her nurses and this causes a pretty unbelievable set of changes. She grows much bigger than the other bees, she develops ovaries, and her lifespan is increased from months to years. All this with a caveat though: she’s a virgin. She’s ignored by the other bees, and any other virgin queens in the hive will hunt her down and try to kill her.
Drones next: Our manly bees are raised by workers as well. They grow up bigger than the workers and have very large and handsome wrap-around-their-whole-head eyes. Those eyes are not for oogling worker bees, mind you: drones have eyes for queens alone.
Drones do not work. They wake up in the morning and eat honey for breakfast. When it’s warm enough outside for easy flight, they leave the hive and fly to drone congregation areas (i.e. man bee dive bars)– legendary locations where they meet up with drones from other hives and — wait for it — sit around and use those huge eyes to watch for queens. All day. And then when it starts getting dark or inclement, they fly home, eat more honey and go to bed.
Queens leave the hive once in their lifetimes. It’s called a nuptial flight: a virgin queen leaves the hive and flies hundreds of feet into the air where she is spotted by drones who fly to her by the dozen. She mates with them in flight one after another. It’s apparently quite a sight, and called a queen comet: a hundred or so bees flying through the air together. The mated drones do not survive — their bodies are torn apart and they fall down to the ground to die. Having mated with a dozen or even dozens of drones, the queen returns and is recognized by other bees as a real queen for the first time.
Finally: winter. Winter is not for lovers. There’s no food outside and it’s too cold to fly. Drones become honey-eaters without purpose, a fact that is not overlooked by their chaste, careworn sisters. And so, when the weather turns cold in the fall, the workers drag hundreds of drones down the combs to the mouth of the hive and throw them out into the cold to die.
We can watch this through our bedroom window– soon our hive will be an exclusive sorority if it’s not already. They’ll huddle together through the cold months, relying on their numbers for warmth and their stores of honey for survival. Come spring, if they’ve survived, they’ll get on with the business of starting over, including raising new drones for the new season.
My hive will have no use for drones next year because my queen is young and strong and will never leave the hive again. But my hive will raise drones in the spring just the same, and maybe they’ll get lucky and fly to queens from who have come to them from other hives in other areas. In everything I’ve learned about bees, this is the thing they do that shows their instinct looks beyond the survival of their very own hive. It’s a bigger and more essential something than any bee or colony that makes it possible. And so somewhere in the lustful, brutal courtship of bees is a love of more than just selves. Exactly as, we declare, all the great love stories tend to go.
hat
I made a hat.
It has my initials on the inside AND a tassel.
It’s too dorky to wear to work, so I wear it on the weekends, and in the evenings after work when my house is all dark and hasn’t warmed up yet from cooking dinner, and sometimes in the mornings right after I get out of bed and before I have to start getting ready for work. It’s a shiny tinfoil hat that shields me from dangerous daylight savings-related mood flux.
I love it a lot.
That is all. Except for this. But how do you even bring that up, you know?
Yes winter!!!
Needle work ’61
I felt the love a lot.
exercise in gratitude
A third harvest for the year.
Thank you, bees.
fall colors
It looks like fall here.
We mail-ordered two more apple trees today: an Arkansas Black to squeeze in next to our flowering quinces, and a Gravenstein for a sunny spot up behind the chicken coop.
Having planted a Fugi and a Winesap the year we moved in, I have an idea what to expect: Our trees will arrive in January looking like little grey walking sticks as thick as my thumb, with a knot of bare roots on one end. They’ll grow agonizingly slowly the first year—a few leaves and pencil branches, and then I’ll get distracted by something else for a while, and when I look back they’ll be taller than I am with trunks as thick as tea saucers.
I’ll definitely run out of tree-sized spaces before I get tired of that, I think.
