I’ve sat to watch exactly zero Cubs games this season. Still, I always knew when the games were and how I would fit listening to the radio into whatever I would be doing on a given day. I wonder if anyone else gets a little bit weepy at the end of the Major League baseball season. Having watched decades of little league through spring and fall as my toddlers turned to teenagers, at least I am let down gently. I know that when the Cubs regular season comes to a close, should they not make the post season, there will still be a few local games left before my boys hang up their cleats for the year.
Everything ends. Bee season is no different, really, from baseball season. In just a few short weeks, the time will come to add sugar boards and wrap my hives with tar paper to button them up for winter. When the cold sets in, through the sparkling snow and blustery winds, I can put my ear to the wooden boxes to feel the warmth of the cluster, I can listen for bee noises, and I can hope. But I can never really know.
A few weeks ago, I added robbing screens to all my hives. As summer turns to fall, forage becomes less available to our bees who had been gathering pollen and nectar for months. The dearth sets in, and bees sometimes look to other hives for resources. They will fight their way in to another colony, robbing out their prized stash of honey. Robbing behavior strips a hive of what it needs to survive. Sometimes, I feel that. And I believe it goes beyond beekeeping.
Most mornings, it takes both Dan and me to get the little guy ready for school and onto the bus. It’s dark when we wake him. He doesn’t want to go, but eventually, he does. I don’t want him to go either— to ride over an hour on the bus to his school— but I know he must. Some days, it breaks me to think what this has come to for him: the angst, the dread, the rage, the tears, the lack of understanding, and the incessant lashing out at those who love him. Though he is made of all the good in this world, he can’t see it. He won’t let others see it, either. I think of all the robbing behaviors that are doing their best to take his childhood from him.
There’s a season for everything. We have seen the darkness reflected in the other boys. We have seen that darkness fade, maybe not all the way to bright but to the direction of the light, anyway. It’s the kind of hope that creeps up on you, like the all-of-a-sudden day when, sometimes with a foot of snow still covering the farm, I hear on the radio that the Cubs pitchers and catchers are reporting for spring training. The hope, as it will, comes back to you.
It’s hard to know just when it’s safe enough to remove the robbing screens. If I take them away too soon, my colonies could be overrun. All the season’s toil—and that of past years, too, could be lost forever. I need to get the mouse guards on, though, before the field mice go looking for a warm spot for a winter’s nap.
Tonight is the last little league game this season. Somehow, Moses shows up on the baseball field even when all other aspects of the day have been hard—when his insecurities have tried to rob him out and when he thinks he’s not good enough. He’s so hard on himself, but he loves the game. That’s enough to get him out there, at least one more time.
I’ll be sad when it’s is over. But like the mouse, I could use a long rest in a warm spot. And I know that before long I will be unwrapping my hives and looking forward to a new season, as it’s sure to come. XO
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