Melissa Bees – Pollinating the Earth with Gardens and Hives
My limbs are heavy from lifting rocks all week. The weather is unusually good for early spring and I’m making the most of it, building a dry-stack wall of sedimentary stone chipped from the flanks of the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana. Its golden colors are exotic to our Northwestern landscape of gray igneous basalt. I’ve noticed there’s a certain kind of honey in these rocks that attracts passersby to them like bees to nectar. In Portland, these bees are usually accompanied by dogs, pausing on their visiting routes to admire its amber and gilt-flecked hues. Last Saturday, the numbers of the curious swelled right along with the heat of late afternoon and they buzzed around me as I worked.
They stand between the unfinished wall and scattered rock piles, wanting to know among other things the origin of the rock, and to ply me with do-it-yourselfer questions. The sweaty brim of my straw hat reveals only the sneakers of the inquirers and paws on the periphery as I attempt to focus on tapping with the hammer in my left hand and checking level with my right while answering as politely as I can muster and still concentrate on the work. I stand up to wipe my brow and speak briefly with an elderly couple holding matching Shih Tzus, then turn back, intent on finishing the puzzle at hand.
I discover that in stopping to chat my attention is broken and not to mention my fragile patience. The last rock I choose to finish a row just won’t seat and no matter how many ways I turn it, it wants to wobble. “Damn,” I growl in frustration, and stand again, this time to stretch imploringly toward the clear blue sky for assistance, “God help me!”
The small swarm of onlookers took a step back.
No rain for at least another week, the paper said, and it isn’t lying. Not a cloud in the sky and eighty degrees, in April. In Oregon.
A black Lab stands on similarly colored asphalt, panting endlessly, overheating in its shedding winter coat. Thin strands of saliva separate from its tongue and splatter on the pavement in a random yet incessant pattern, reminding me of a wild boar fountain I saw in Rome once that salivates grossly and regularly into a grate at its feet. The dog’s owner, in pink slippers and red toenails, apparently takes no notice of her pet’s discomfort and stares disapprovingly at me through her Jackie-O’s. I can’t tell if it was my entreaty to God or the grungy cut-offs I’m wearing that disturbs her most.
I turn back to the rock pile, and ask searchingly, “Whoooo wants to go next?” “Whooo’s going to be the lucky fella?” With this utterance the dry spell is broken and I spy a lone rock, sitting all by itself in the grass. Somehow I had missed it. Perhaps it rolled away from the pallet during one of my desperate and impatient siftings through the stack. I take a closer look and see how exquisite this one is, with a design like a stylized cloud, reminiscent of the ‘cloud step’ form in Japanese carpentry. It is as if it had drifted away from the haphazard pile on purpose, patiently waiting to be noticed for its singular beauty. I scoop it up from the grass and it floats effortlessly in my hands to the wall, finding a perfect home.