August 21, 2009--Mid-Coast: The Honey People

The Honey People live a short walk from here.

Out front there is a hand-lettered sign that says Raw Honey and on a wooden plank that’s supported by two old milk crates there are always, in size places, eight bottles of honey very precisely spaced. And an Honor Box, where you are supposed to put the cash. And, if necessary, take your change. In case anything remains unclear there is another sign—Take Honey--Leave Money. This system would clearly not work where I am from—the streets of Brooklyn—but I assume that up here it works fine.

Though the payment arrangements say they require honor, to make sure it is being implemented as one would hope in even small, crime-free towns such as this, the residents of this shot-gun cottage always seem to be lined up, as if collapsed in a row of wooden rocking chairs, side by side, just like their jars of honey, right out there on their front porch, not more than 10 feet from their display. Rocking gently, never appearing to exchange word. Just watching the infrequent flow of cars, strollers, and of course their merchandise, adjusting it periodically as the sun shifts. To keep the jars as much as possible in the shade.

Rona on occasion suffers from allergies to pollens and in addition to the Zyrtec she always has with her, following the advice of a friend who seems to know about these things, whenever we settle into a new place, with its own distinct pollens, we look for honey derived from the same flowering plants that cause her sniffles because according to that friend if you ingest enough local honey it has the effect of dampening the allergic symptoms. Sort of immunizes you against what’s in the air. So what better piece of good preventative fortune than to find right near by the very kind of honey it would ordinary take days to locate at a local store or organic market.

So on our daily walks we have been circling in closer and closer to take a look at the honey to see if in fact it is local. One evening the Honey People were not for the moment arranged on their porch and this gave us an opportunity for an unobserved look at the labels on the jars. We preferred to do this privately because if it was honey imported from some other part of Maine or the northeast we wouldn’t be interested. Since it was not so much to serve as cooking or sweetening honey but medicinal honey, we didn’t want to, as sort of neighbors, look it over and then, realizing it would not be a good prophylactic, walk away without taking a jar and depositing $9.00 in the Honor Box.

But the label did not provide all the information we required. Very much homemade, it simple said—

Pure
HONEY
MN Honey
R_____ Pt. ME

Promising, but not conclusively local. We were confused by the MN and the ME. ME is for Maine of course, but the MN? For Minnesota? Couldn’t be. Must be a typo. But again, we are not really honey people, nine dollars is not nothing, and if it wasn’t from very local bees and plants we wouldn’t be able to test our friend’s hypothesis, nor would Rona get whatever relief might be available from the real thing. So to get answers, we would have to engage the Honey People. No way to avoid what up to now we had been avoiding.

I’ve mentioned that though we have passed them dozens of times, driving slowly by—it is a narrow and twisting road—or on foot during morning and evening strolls, we have never observed between them any form of verbal or nonverbal communication. They rock in slow unison, and though that may pass with them for interaction, this stolid stoniness does not feel like much of an invitation to outside interaction.

But then a few weeks ago, on an evening stroll, one of the two Honey Women had come down from the porch and was gathering the unsold jars, we assumed to take them inside until the next morning. We began to cross the road ostensibly to have a better view of potential car traffic but more in truth to avoid swinging too close to her. We thought she would prefer for us to respect the zone of separation they established for themselves, from each other, and the rest of the world.

But before we could reach the other side, she called out to us, waving to us to join her, “I don’t bite,” she said.

This, as you might imagine, stopped us dead in our tracks in the middle of the road, and an approaching Subaru Outback needed to swerve to avoid us. “I don’t.” This woman who we had never observed except silently and expressionlessly rocking even smiled at us and we could see, from 30 feet away, that she was virtually toothless.

When we got back to her side of the road she waddled over toward us as if to greet and welcome us. She was dressed in a tent of a dress that seemed constructed from tablecloth rather than clothing fabric, fulfilling the rest of the Appalachian stereotype. “I’ve seen you eyein’ my honey. The best in all of Maine. I like to say, good for what ails you.” We thought that she also somehow knew about Rona’s allergies and was indicating to us that she had the cure for them. “I’ll bet some of our bees have been visiting with you. Your wildflowers I mean. Right now there must be all those nettle plants flowering—be sure not to touch those suckers. They have those nasty thorns that come loose and stick in you hands and legs. Nettlesome, I’d say.” She smiled at this etymological lesson. “Then them asters. And the last of the lupine. Have you any of them left? A little late for them to be in flower I know. But there should still be a few lingerin’. Be sure to remember to scatter those seeds. Just break open the pods once they’re all dried out. Me and the bees will be needing them again next spring. That lupine nectar is a big part of our mix.

“I think I know where you’re staying so I figure what’s growing there.” How would she know that I wondered? We were renting close to her place but were not in direct visual alignment and there was little likelihood that she was capable of doing much walking up and down the steep hills she would need to navigate to get to our cottage.

“My bees don’t have all that much time to do their gatherin’. This far north here we have a short flower season. A lot of them fall flowers are already coming out and before too many more weeks things’ll start to die back. All that rain earlier, which wasn’t so good for you summer people, did some wonders for the flowers. But on all those gray days my bees couldn’t get oriented. They need sunlight to guide them you know. To make those beelines back and forth.” Again she smiled at her way with phrases. “Yes indeed. They have a short life but work hard every minute of it. Busy as a bee, you might say.” This time we did the smiling.

“So your honey is not just raw and pure, which I assume means it’s not processed in any way.” She was nodding. “But,” Rona asked, “Is it really local? I ask because . . .”

“You have those nasty allergies,” she finished Rona’s sentence. Now it was Rona who did the nodding. “Well, as I said, this honey is good for what ails you. So if I were you, ailing some, I’d give it a try. And you,” looking now directly at me, “you look like to me like you like to do some cookin’,” again how would she know that, “and I can promise you that if you add some of this here honey to half the things you’re makin’ it will do both of you lots of good. Especially the lady. And make everything taste extra special.”

She was also clearly a persuasive salesperson, and Rona was already digging in her pocket book for nine dollars; and I was looking at the jars still on display to see which one to take. “They’re all the same. You can close you eyes and pick one and not go wrong. All pure. All,” she winked, “local. Right from your garden.”

“I think we’ll take this one,” I said. “And then we’ll leave you to finish up.”

“No rush. None at all. I don’t have much to do all day, now that all we have to do is sit out here rockin’ and sell what we can. The work’s later in the year. When the bees are done with their work that’s when ours begins. Getting’ the bees out of the hive and the honey out of the combs. Lots to do to get things ready for you when you come back next spring.” How did she know we were considering that? Extending the summer season. She not only by her own claim made the best honey in the state but she was prescient as well. This was turning out to be quite unexpected.

“And I’ll bet you don’t know that that Greek philosopher Aristotle thousands of years ago thought a lot about how bees can find their way back and forth from the flowers to their hives. Even from quite far away without being able to see their way home.”

“No I didn’t know that,” I confessed. “To tell you the truth I haven’t thought too much about bees and their ways.”

“Well, you should. Lots of lessons there about cooperation and communicatin’. Both of which are in short supply among us so-called higher animals, so to speak.”

“I certainly agree with that,” I said.

“How they find their way back and forth illustrates that. How they work together. It was some German or Austrian fella who figured all this out about the beginin’ of the last century. By watchin’ them in action. Like I said, he discovered it’s all about communicatin’. Which we could pay some attention to too. He saw that when the scout bees, that’s what they’re called, came back from finding some good sources of pollen they danced a dance on the honeycomb for the worker bees. To get their attention. A figure eight dance if you can imagine. I can show it to you if you want to come by early one morning just after the sun rises. It’s really somethin’. And then the scouts, after tellin’ them what they found, takes the lead in showin’ them where. That’s really what a beeline is—the line of dozens of worker bees—all females by the way,” she winked again at Rona, “linin’ up and followin’ those scouts. It’s nature’s way. And as I keep sayin’ till you’ll for sure get tired of hearing me, it should be ours as well.”

“I’m not at all getting tired of hearing about these lessons from the bees,” Rona said. “There are others from nature as well that we would be wise to follow.”

“Like taking some of my honey every morning. Right?” She was grinning toothlessly.

“I promise to try.”

“And you’ll come by and let me know how you do, right?” Rona indicated that she would. “And don’t pay no mind to those others—my husband Jimmy and my boy Sam and his wife Betty who’s also from these parts. I’m Sally, by the way,” she reached out to shake our hands and we took hers as we introduced ourselves. “I know they look off-puttin’ but to tell you the truth they’re harmless. Though we don’t do much talkin’ we’re like our bees. We find ways to do our little communicatin’ dance, not exactly figure eights mind you, but by pullin’ together we’ve got ourselves, all of us, through some real hard times. But you don’t want to hear about that now do you? You’re here for your good times.”

“Actually, when I come back to let you know how I do with my allergies, if you don’t mind, I’d like to learn more from you. About your life and of course from your bees.”

That was about three weeks ago; and though as a precaution in every room of this cottage Rona put out boxes of tissues, since her daily dose of Sally’s honey—swirled into yogurt at midday and in some of the stir fries I’ve been making for dinner—pretty much all of them have remained untouched. And although we did report back about Rona’s dry nose, which didn’t surprise Sally in the least, we haven’t as we did that first time again found her alone at the end of the day. To talk more with her about her bees and her life we think it would work better that way. The rest of her family, in spite of what Sally said about them, continue to inhibit us. We have some stereotypes still to overcome; but we have two or three more weeks here and I suspect will be taking lots of early evening walks.