BEES

            When we were little, we used to catch bees behind the house next-door, bees that sat on pears that had fallen from the tree and were rotting.

            We would quickly sneak up on a bee, lower a glass jar over the whole pear and, if we were lucky, catch it.

            We were only five or so, Jerry Baumann, my next-door neighbor and I.

            The bees would then rush and hit against the sides of the jar, they would try to get out the top, but in time they would crumple up and lay down at the bottom, their wings flapping ever so slightly, their breathing labored, the exuberance of their former flight --- no more to be seen.

            Then, we'd quickly create schemes to save the bees --- punch holes in the top of the jar for starters --- that was always a good idea.  We’d put in bits of grass and flowers and dandelions, things we thought they would like to eat that would make them move again.

            But, invariably the bees would get weaker and weaker ---in spirit if not in strength, and we'd watch as the bright, yellow, fluffy things that had been flying around enchanting us, batted up against the walls of the jar a few more times, then dwindled there before us --- no matter what we did.

            Usually, we were lucky enough to let them out in time and, at first they'd be quizzical, but then they'd gain strength and slowly fly off --- to the sky, to the trees, to the flowers where they belonged.

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            I've been thinking lately about the catching of bees when I was five or so, thinking of the bees as an analogy to the people we say we love --- how we are attracted to them because they are yellow and fuzzy and free and because they FLY but, then, we try to put them in a glass jar, confine them to a small space, throwing in odds and ends of food and air we think they'll like; how we watch the very person we were attracted to just dwindle away and dry up, laying quietly on their side on top of a few tufts of grass

            Slowly losing the life and the flight that was theirs ---

            The life we said we loved them for.

Mary Pat Kane

THE ONE MORE TIME KID --- ON LEAVING THE ADIRONDACK MOUNTAINS AS A YOUNG GIRL

On the last day of a 2-week vacation every year in the Adirondack Mountains, a Sunday, we had to clean like crazy for the people coming in.  It was an old family camp and each part of the family had two weeks there.
 

My ritual as a young girl after cleaning was to go down the stairs to the lake and dive in and stay as long as I could with my mother constantly hollering down to me that I should get out and get dry or I’d "catch cold with my hair all wet" while we were driving home.  But, I never got out of the lake early. I’d just dive 'one more time, one more time,' until I would finally have to get out, clamber up the hill behind the camp and get in the back seat of our car.  Then, it was up and down the hills of the driveway, turn left onto the main road, through the small town of Eagle Bay, NY with me crying all the way.  The family story was that I would cry straight to Old Forge, a nine mile trip from Eagle Bay according to the road sign, then I’d stop.

That was until the year after I had stopped crying on entering Old Forge, that there, just outside the town, stood a beautiful deer to the side of the road.  The glorious animal got me started crying again.  I don’t know how long it lasted.

Mary Pat Kane