I’m pulling the weeds from around the fruit trees in the orchard, because they’re ugly, and because I’m making room for my red clover to grow. For the bees.
Five horses are lined up along the fence line, hoping for a handout. But horses won’t eat weeds, unless they’re starved, that is, and mine are a far cry from thin, believe me. I manage to pull up a few handfuls of volunteer timothy grass, which is gobbled with copious amounts of greed from my outstretched hands. I have to dispense the sweet green stuff judiciously, or there will be an altercation among mares and the one Percheron gelding who doesn’t hesitate to muscle his way through feed.
Voles have murdered at least five of my precious trees, not in the orchard, thank goodness, not yet, anyway, but from the initial two dozen we planted. Chewed up the roots of the trees we’ve tended like babies to get them growing out of this dry red earth. And I’m pissed. Beyond all imagining. If those varmints didn’t live underground, only to come up for air once in a blue moon like furry poltergeists—right there in the furthermost corner of my eye, and, no, I’m not imagining it—I would get my husband’s shotgun, and they’d be … well … history.
A dirt devil whirls across the bare pasture, almost like a living thing. I imagine rattling bones. The Day of the Dead Man in his horse-drawn cart. It blows the few stray blades of grass just out of the horses’ reach. Poor things amble after it towards the fence line.
I worry that the wind will blow the bees away. Or off course. How will they find their way home? I’m wondering. There are supersedure cells in the Carniolan hive. Which means the hive has lost its queen, or she is ill and dying, or I’m not sure what else. I’m still learning. But I do know that the round, white chamber built of wax on top of the usual hexagonal cells means that a new queen is being made ready. The intensity of the Carniolan bees’ buzzing increases when I peer into the frames, which are heavy with brood, pollen, honey. Make ready for the queen, they are saying. In the evenings, my head is bent over the bee tomes, trying to decode the mystery.
I wipe the grit from my mouth, wrestle a wooly weed from the ground. It’s all dirt and weeds, I’m thinking. Dirt and weeds. The words fly around my head like the tornado that just missed us two weeks ago.
I know I am prone to this type of thing. Depression, that is.
I’ve managed to escape the full-blown variety for many many years now. No more Prozac for me. No. Sirree. Bob. No matter how many generations of my family might have had problems with their serotonin.
It’s just that sometimes it sneaks up on me, kind of like weeds poking their ugly faces up through the sand—that one time I reached the end of my rope. How long will I go back to that particular point of reference, I wonder? With each weed I toss to the wind, I consider the pills I held in my hand the one night I teetered precariously on the edge of the very end of things, certain that I couldn’t live one more day. The burden of my first marriage had become too much for me. I’d been strong enough to bear it, and my youth and strength had kept me there as long as it had, along with a good dose of fear of the fire and brimstone variety, and trying to be a good godly woman, whatever the hell that means now. And then suddenly I was this broken thing, all chewed up at the roots, blown so far off course I was lost in the weeds. Tangled up in the barbed wire like a tumbleweed.
Post Traumatic Stress, the doctors called it, when I made the decision to check myself in, instead of murdering myself.
The thought of that single moment still terrifies me, as I consider my old friend Caprichosa considering me over the fence, swishing her tail, ears pricked forward, muzzle flecked with gray. A gift from my ex, the Andalusian horse was how one very small man tried to assuage his own very large guilt for the assaults to my body and my soul, both so thin I very nearly disappeared.
The white horse is shaking her head at me. Because she would like some more timothy grass. Because she always knows.
They let me paint that week in the hospital.
I painted horses.
Reams of them.
The art therapist let me hang my horses on the walls. A herd of horses galloped across the blue concrete blocks while my new also clinically depressed friends, many of whom had known true horror, ooohed and aaaaahed, very possibly increasing the uptake of their own serotonin. This is a small town. I used to see those men and women in the grocery store or at the Wal-Mart, although we pretended not to know one another when we did, passing each other surreptitiously in the aisles with our dark and secret pasts. Our shared week in the psych ward. But not any more. A lot of years have passed.
I brush the dirt from my jeans. Make my way to the next tree in the row. Bend down, grasp the thorny stem of some unidentifiable growth that’s sneering at me and give it a yank, but I only wind up stripping the stem of its fleshy leaves, landing with a thud on my ass. A forager bee buzzes past me against the wind that's kicking up again, against all odds in what must be to her a thousand mile flight home, although to me it's only a hundred feet to the snug white hives, and in her gossamer wings I see the future that's right now. The one I couldn’t possibly have foreseen in the midddle of that pitch black night.
My life here on a pretty little ranch. The one with horses and bees and trees and cattle dogs. And, yes, voracious tree eating voles. And a man who loves me and Jessie and Cole—my precious babies who were, back then, the sole reason I decided to keep on living, the ones who held me in the open palms of their hands, here in the land of the living, no matter how thorny the brambles were or how the weeds choked me nearly to death.
And it occurs to me, as yet another dirt devil is whipping up his big stuff just on the other side of the fence, which sends Caprichosa careening off in a flash of hooves, that despite ten years of dirt, a drought that would have had Pharaoh quaking and letting every single one of them go, a wee little man didn’t manage to kill me after all.
Sprawled beneath a tree, with the wind tearing about me, I'm feeling every bit of it— the convergence of the bitter and the sweet, the deepest darkness and the brightest light, the worker bee clinging wildly to a wildflower.
Making ready for the birth of royalty.
