goldengrove unleaving

Spring and fall: to a young child
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

(Autumn: Mary Cassatt)

what's the buzz? or, bees in my bonnet

"Buzz" has become one of the most hateful words in the English language.

About 2 weeks ago, I found a dead - insect - in my bathroom, which has no insulation, a pitiful, tiny heat grate, a veneer vanity that peels if you try to clean it, and a door that opens to the garage. The previous owners must have been - - words fail me, especially since they built it for their aged parents. (Perhaps they did not like their parents. It happens.) Only one detail distinguishes this room from an outhouse: it doesn't have a crescent moon carved in the door.

The next day, I heard buzzing. Several - insects - were flying around the skylight. Since I was not wearing my glasses, I assumed the buzzing was from bees. I panicked (even though I do have an Epi-pen on the shelf), and grabbed the first thing I could to spray at them. Unfortunately, it was a tub cleaner with bleach. The buzzing continued. The bleach fell onto some of my clothes. (In fact, about 1/3 of my work clothes now sport polka-dots. I do not like polka-dots.)

The bleach did not work. Next, I swatted at them with a towel. I missed. Good thing, too. When my DH came in to see, he informed me that the buzzers were not bees. They were yellowjackets. Ferocious, lethal yellowjackets.

We got some of the appropriate insecticide and sprayed all of the suspected portals. They kept coming. My DH began to caulk the likely portals. They kept coming. Then he broke out the duct tape. They kept coming.

I wandered outside the yard while he caulked and taped. What I saw out there was horrible, horrible: a swarm of yellowjackets, hundreds of them, flying in and out of the siding outside of where the bathroom had been slapped together built. It was like something out of Hitchcock - The Birds, perhaps - except with buzzing. My DH emptied a can of wasp spray under the siding.

If a wasp could twirl its moustache and sneer, these would have been twirling and sneering a loud HAH! I went to the hardware store and said, "short of a flamethrower, do you have anything for swarms of yellowjackets?" I came home. DH sprayed. HAH!

I did some research and learned that yellowjackets can build nests that can cover a football field. (Slight hyperbole. Slight.) I probably have been showering about 2 inches from an entire wall of their honeycomb-like nest. (The horror!)

The exterminator is coming tomorrow. I hope he has a flamethrower.

When I get really depresssed, a donation to Heifer International often cheers me. Usually, I buy a beehive. Somehow, yesterday, I didn't feel like buying a beehive, so I went for the trees. Yes, I do feel a little better.