…Mama passed Tuesday. Be easy. It was my mother’s hand. I have thirty-nine years of grocery lists and permission slips to compare it against, and I’d have known it upside down in the dark.
My grandmother died in June of 2018. I remember the week — I remember it badly, the way you do — and I remember that my mother disappeared for an afternoon and came back with red clay on her shoes and wouldn’t say where she’d been. She’d been out at hive 9. On my grandfather’s ground, where the barn stood.
There’s an old custom in those hills that when somebody in the house dies you go out and tell the bees, or the colony grieves and leaves. My grandmother believed it and did it. Her mother did it. And my mother, who called all of it foolishness in front of me for my entire life, drove out there alone with a pencil and a square of a bedsheet and told the bees her mother was gone.
She didn’t tell me. She never told me. She died herself in the spring of 2022, and I sat at her funeral with no idea that thing was sitting in a box a hundred yards from my back door, getting sealed in a little more each summer.
The bees built around it for six years. Propolis over every edge, comb drawn out and over, until it was part of the wall of that hive. They kept it better than I keep anything.
I put it back. Cleaned the frame up, set it in the middle of the brood chamber, and closed the box.
And this April, when my father passed, I went out there myself with a pencil.
I don’t know if I believe it. I know I went.
