“I have a little story to tell you.” My friend called me on a Monday evening. She knew that I was on the way to play in my pool league, and promised to call me later in the week. My friend lives in Louisville, Ky., in an 88-tear-old home that she loves, but that challenges her with cracks, creaks, basement floods and, perhaps as a result of last season’s brutal winter, stinkbug invasions.
The age of the house gives insects, including stinkbugs, a wealth of spaces and places to winter. Using the patented “cup and cardboard capture” method, she rounds up the ugly bugs, making sure that they do not emit the smell for which they are named, and flushes them down the toilet, an action about which she is unapologetic. “I do not release them outside,” she said. “I don’t want them to come back.” One day, she found a small bee. “Bees are beneficial,” she said. She managed to capture it in a glass jar and release it outdoors. On another day, there was another bee, and she idly wondered if some queen had a hive within her old walls. She knows that queen bees can deliver a large number of baby bees, and she was concerned about that possibility.
My friend has a collection of rocks on an iron table that sits on the patio beneath her kitchen window. The rocks are gifts from friends and relatives, who gather them on their travels and bring them to her. She remembers who gave her the rocks, and from where they were gathered. The rocks are arranged in no specific pattern on the iron table, but when guests come to visit, they are drawn to them.
“People pick them up, touch them, look at them and then — rearrange them.” My friend, an artist, said, “This does not bother me.” She enjoys seeing the silent communion with the objects that are precious to her. I imagined the exercise as some kind of personal feng shui. Some years ago, my friend and I sat at this table, and while we quietly mourned the passing of another friend, a butterfly landed on a post; it opened and closed its wings for us, a signal that we decided was from that friend, come to join the conversation.
On the day before Easter, in a small dishpan she had set in her sink, my friend found another baby bee, face-down in the water, unmoving and drowned. Using a paper towel, she gently scooped it up. She placed the towel — and the bee — on the counter. A 9-year-old neighbor girl visits her often, and my friend planned to have her join in a burial ceremony for the bee. “She enjoys those kinds of little rituals with me.” When later in the day, she opened the paper towel, she found the bee moving its legs. “Its wings were stuck to the table, but it was alive.” She managed to gently free the bee and, placing it once again on the paper towel, took it outside. “I know that bees cannot fly if their wings are wet, and I wanted it to dry its wings.” She placed the bee, still on the paper towel, among the rocks on her table. “Its little legs were spread between a crease in the towel,” and it feebly moved its wings, drying them in the sun.
On that Saturday before Easter, she did not see the bee rise from the rocks and fly away, but she said this to me:
“I felt that I was a witness to a small miracle.”