Honeybees
Ashley Anderson
A big blue pickup truck pulled into the driveway of the house across the street, an assortment of chairs and children’s toys piled up in the back. “Oh, it looks like someone’s moving in over there,” my mom said.
It was a lazy late spring afternoon in the Anderson household, with both of my parents, my two younger sisters, and I lying around the living room, reading or playing games on someone’s tablet. Occasionally, my dad would fall asleep in his recliner by the window, only to snore loud enough that he woke himself up from his nap. In a house with no air conditioning and the temperature outside reaching into the eighties, today was not meant to be an exciting day.
The blue truck signaled a change in the neighborhood. The house across the street had stood empty for almost five years before that afternoon when the blue truck pulled in, barely tapping the brakes before whipping into a right turn around the weathered wood mailbox. The house was part of a bigger place, what used to be part of a farm that spread over forty acres of trees and fields and a small lake back in the woods. My neighbor’s family sold this farm at auction in October 2013. My neighbor’s son, well into his retirement years, was not in good health and couldn’t take care of the property anymore. A lot of farms in my hometown went on the auction block that fall. First, my grandma’s in September, then this one, the Ryans’, in October, and another family friend’s farm around the corner the following spring.
While his childhood home was sold to the highest bidder, he sat in his red econobox car parked just out of sight of the auction, tears streaming down his face. Meanwhile, I stood in the backyard behind the little log cabin house with my parents, wondering who our new neighbors were going to be.
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Ruth “Toots” Ryan, the mother of the man named Dan Senior who cried in his red car while the farm was sold, lived in the house across the street from my parents and I for as long as anyone in the neighborhood could remember. Overlooking the land that went from being my grandfather’s popcorn field to my parents’ yard, Toots’s farm stretched from the street to beyond where a bystander could see, encompassing a seven-acre lake, a small forest housing a flock of wild turkeys, and a bunch of barns and storage buildings, another quiet remnant of a time when the majority of families in my hometown of Atwater, Ohio, farmed in some way or another. Toots and Dan Senior still rented part of the farm out to a local farmer to plant each year, his giant combines and tractors rolling down our road that heaved and sank like an old washboard missing a few slats.
Growing up, Toots and my grandmother were the two keepers of the stories in my life. From my grandmother, I absorbed the stories of my family’s past, of Grandma growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, of the antics my uncle and aunt pulled when they were children, and of my grandfather who died when I was 2. From Toots, I learned the stories of the neighborhood, both the ins and outs. Whenever I stepped into her house, there was always the opportunity to travel back in time to another one of her adventures. Usually, I wandered across the street for one reason or another. Sometimes, it was to sell Girl Scout cookies, which Toots bought by the case and froze for Dan Senior as a treat until the next fall and next order sheet came around. Sometimes, my mom sent me over with a question. Sometimes, I was just bored and looking for someone to talk to.
As a child, it was hard to look down when inside of Toots’s house. She was a collector, everything that she accumulated over the years sitting on shelves of her tiny log cabin house without carpet, framing the ceiling with a museum you could only see if you looked up. Usually, as Toots examined the latest Girl Scout cookie order form, a giant glossy piece of cardstock with colorful pictures of cookies priced at $2.50 a box, I looked up at old pieces of Depression glass, milk glass candy dishes, specimen bottles holding dried flowers and plants, and an untold number of rocks, fossils, and other natural treasures. In the living room, there was a stuffed lizard sitting on the window sill.
Perhaps I went digging for a story by asking about a particular piece of her collection. “Where did the lizard come from?” I asked.
“Oh, I probably found that somewhere in Arizona. The kids thought it might make a cool pet, so I let them bring it home.” Much of Toots’s collection came to be because something was interesting or eye-catching or just different, so someone brought it home. As I got older and learned more about Toots’s past, I also wondered if that was the same Arizona trip where Toots’s ex-husband Woody, a mountain man with a disdain for the dentist, fell in love with another woman and refused to come home with the rest of the family.
“So why do you keep the lizard in the window?” I asked, my childhood curiosity wondering why they hadn’t buried the lizard when it died, just like we did with my guinea pig.
“He looked at home there,” Toots probably replied. Or maybe it was because the lizard could continue to sun itself in the afterlife. Or, more likely, it was probably the only space Toots could find for the poor soul.
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Seeing the house across the street sit vacant from the time it was sold until now caused me to wonder. Who were these new neighbors? I wondered if they knew how many stories the little log cabin house could tell if the house could speak for itself. But even if the house could speak for itself, I wondered if anyone new to the neighborhood would be able to understand the stories it would tell. None of the walls in the house were straight and none of the corners squared , which created a winding maze of rooms with very little space to act as connective hallways. The basement was partitioned off into rooms arranged in such a way that it was hard to distinguish the basement from a game of architectural Tetris.
Since the house was sold, the new owners had been in and out remodeling the inside of the house. No one in my family or I knew what the inside looked like now, but we knew it was different than the sparse living space that Toots filled with her things and her stories. Woody never allowed Toots to spend money on things he felt were frivolous, which included carpet and rugs and trappings that typically make a space warm and cozy. I still remember walking across the floor and feeling not only the floorboards through the wood planks, but also having to be careful of the slanted descent from the kitchen to the front of the house to the living room. One misstep and a person could find themselves tumbling through the house.
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Toots held a lot of roles in her life aside from storyteller. The one she was known the most for was her hobby, or I guess you could call it a job, as the head beekeeper for our county. After a lifetime of performing with the circus, driving a school bus, teaching my grandmother how to drive a car, and working as the head of housekeeping at the local hospital during the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University, Toots found a job that allowed her to quietly retire but still hold on to something she loved—her bees. The four white boxes that were her hives sat just far enough away from the north side of the house so that the bees had their space and Toots had hers.
As the head beekeeper, Toots did a lot of talking to people about bees. She inspected and signed off on hives, educated people about how to handle bees or start their own hives, and gave extension lectures about the value of honeybees to the local ecosystem. Toots did all of this in her everyday clothes, not once donning a beekeeper’s suit or gear. She knew her bees well enough that they were like her children, and she trusted them as if they were her own flesh and blood.
Sometimes, she trusted them too much.
Over the years, Toots’s bees staged multiple escape attempts, fleeing the hives like mischievous children running away from home to join the circus. In retrospect, it was the perfect example of the apple falling not far from the tree—Toots herself ran away to join the circus, and her bee children did something similar about once a year. When the bees escaped, they usually flew across the street and set up camp in our yard, buzzing around my mom’s flowers and the dandelions growing around the house.
After such an escape, Toots would wander across the street and cut through our front yard, especially if she saw my younger sister Erin and I playing in the backyard . “Hello there, young ladies,” she said. Most likely, we were swinging on the swing set my dad and uncles built for us or playing in the sandbox my dad installed when I was old enough to figure out how a shovel worked. It was one of those late mornings when the temperature began to spike beyond the miserable point on the thermometer, and the most comfortable place to be was outside, barefoot, and in the shade. “You haven’t happened to see any of my honey bees around here lately, have you?”
Erin and I looked at each other, confused. Neither of us were old enough to tell the difference between one of Toots’s bees and any other garden-variety bee. “Nope,” we both replied.
“Well, you girls keep your eyes out for them. Don’t want ya to get stung,” Toots said as she scanned the grass again for one of her fugitive bees. “If you happen to find any, can you bring them across the road to me? I need to get them back in the hive before it gets too cold for them.”
My sister and I nodded our heads in agreement and said goodbye as Toots walked back across the street, again just walking through the yard instead of down the driveway. Inspired by the lost bees and motivated by our stubborn competitive streaks, Erin and I went inside and began rooting through our mother’s cupboards, looking for something we could punch holes in and keep the bees alive until we could return them to Toots.
My mom walked into the kitchen, trying to find the source of all the noise we suddenly started making. “Girls, what are you doing!” She eyed all of her casserole dishes, plastic bowls, and storage containers scattered across the kitchen floor, a plastic and glass and metal search party getting organized to go look for a lost loved one.
“Toots’ bees ran away,” Erin said. At the time, Erin and I were old enough to know that bees stung, but still fearless enough in our childhood oblivion to think that the bees would not sting us because we were trying to help. “We need something to put them in so we can take them back to her before they catch a cold,” Erin added.
At that point, my mother told us to put everything away, chuckling as she said that Toots’ bees were going to be okay and make it back home on their own. They did, but the threat of cold weather or catching human colds didn’t prevent the little worker bees from escaping several more times during my childhood, each time Toots sending out the alarm first in person, then on the telephone asking us to keep an eye out for her missing bees.
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After the house was sold, the new owners set to work on the house. They weren’t strangers to us. In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Stroup, who bought the house at the auction as long as the farmer who planted the fields would be allowed to harvest his crop, rented land from several older families in the area, including my grandmother while she was still alive. When the auctioneer asked Mr. Stroup to agree to that condition, Mr. Stroup chuckled. “Sure hope so,” he said. “Those are my crops out there anyway.” The crowd laughed and the auctioneer declared the property sold .
Originally, my neighbors and my parents thought that Mr. and Mrs. Stroup were fixing up the house to rent it out to their son and daughter-in-law, but as time wore on, there were fewer and fewer signs of life across the street. Occasionally, a pickup truck would ramble down the gravel and dirt driveway, only to leave just as quickly as it arrived. The grass in the yard grew taller and taller, and after a while, my mom became concerned. “It looks like no one is keeping an eye on the place,” she said. “If they aren’t careful, someone’s going to try to squat on the property, and then they’ll have to take care of someone living in their house when they aren’t allowed to be there.”
People came and went, but no one really stayed until the day the blue pickup truck filled with chairs and toys pulled in. We all had our theories as to why—the slanted floors, the crooked corners, the $995 a month the Stroups were asking for rent. Finally, someone decided to take a chance on the place, which had been given a face lift with faux wood siding instead of the log cabin look and a security light outside the back porch door that didn’t flicker when the wind blew.
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I never remember my mother buying honey as a child. Instead, Toots had more than enough honey to share. With all of the plants and flowers within her honeybees’ reach, there was more than enough raw materials for them to create gallons of honey in the course of a season, and more often than not, it was too much honey for Toots to possibly consume on her own.
So, like her stories and her adventures, Toots shared with anyone in the neighborhood who was willing to take some. More often than not, that meant accepting homemade honey by the gallon milk jug. More often than not, it also meant getting the milk jug that we gave to Toots several months ago back. No one could blame Toots for not being resourceful.
The batch of honey that stands out among the many gallons my family and I used over the years was the red honey. It was Labor Day weekend, and my mom’s side of the family was gathered at Grandma’s house for a cookout. Burgers and hot dogs sizzled on the grill, while a veggie tray and potato salad sat inside on the dining room table. Everyone was outside enjoying the sunshine, waiting for the food to be ready.
Toots pulled into the driveway, driving the same red car that her son sat in while their farm was sold at auction. “Hiya, Toots!” my grandma said from her place on the bench my uncle made for her on the deck.
“Hi, everybody!” Toots said as she hobbled over to the party. As usual, her gray hair was braided and twisted around her hairline, forming a perfect braided halo of gray hair around her head. “I stopped by Jenny and Carl’s to drop off some honey, but I saw that y’all were down here instead.” My Uncle John, who moved to Florida when I was 9 and was home for a visit, got up and gave Toots a big bear hug.
“Whatchya got in the jug, Toots?” he asked.
“Oh, this is some red honey. I normally don’t get this kind of honey from my bees, but this year they made more of it than I can use, so I thought I’d share what I couldn’t keep.” She sat an old gallon milk jug on the picnic table, filled with a thick, sticky substance the color of bourbon.
Looking back, what Toots had in those jugs may not have actually been red honey, which is often produced in the Himalayan mountains and is known to have hallucinogenic side effects. Other cases of red honey have been reported throughout the United States, but it was often because hives of bees lived within traveling distance of candy factories or were fed crushed up candy canes, the dye in the bees’ diets turning their honey a candy-colored shade of red. It might have been something in the flowers that year or a change in the balance of sugar and water in the hives, that gave Toots’s honey a dark brown color that year instead of the light amber stuff that filled the teddy bear-shaped bottles at the grocery store.
“That looks cool, man! I wouldn’t mind having some to take back to Florida with me,” Uncle John said.
“Oh, don’t worry, there’s plenty in the car,” Toots said. As the burgers and hot dogs came off the grill, Toots passed around enough honey for everyone—a jug for my parents, one for Uncle John, one for Grandma, and one for my aunt working the grill.
Our jug emptied itself sparingly, sitting for years on the very bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard. My family wasn’t big on honey, but one day a couple of years after Toots shared her honey with us, I asked my mom if honey spoiled.
“It shouldn’t,” my mom said. “There’s enough sugar in it to kill anything that tried to live in there.”
For some reason, I drug the jug of honey out of the cupboard and made the first and only peanut butter and honey sandwich of my life, dunking a butter knife into the gallon jug and trying to catch enough honey to spread on a piece of bread. When I was satisfied with my creation, honey oozing out from between the whole wheat crusts, I took my sandwich outside. Something told me that this was going to be messy.
As I ate, the wind blew the oozing honey into the yard, thin sheets glistening as they floated on the breeze. By this time, Toots was barely keeping up with her honeybees, and it had been years since any of them escaped into our yard. In a way, Toots’s honey on my sandwich was coming full circle, returning to the plants and flowers that gave it form in the first place.
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As evening fell during the weeks our new neighbors moved in, my family and I saw signs of life returning to what used to be Toots’ farm. The two adults and several of the kids would venture outside, wandering around the front yard, playing catch, or just simply exploring their new home. They mostly stayed in the front yard and the yard on the north side of the house, where Toots’s beehives and flower gardens used to be. For me, seeing children on that side of the house was an unusual sight, mostly because my sisters and I weren’t allowed anywhere near the beehives as kids. Our banishment from the yard on the north side of the house was the result of a silent understanding between Toots and my parents, knowing that two, then three curious kids were bound to get into trouble when someone wanted to know what was inside of those white boxes.
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On October 31, 2007, my youngest sister Katie’s school bus pulled up to our driveway, dropping her off with costume and classroom party loot in hand. Just as the yellow giant’s brakes screeched and the air released with its great huff, an ambulance pulled out of Toots’s driveway and rushed her to the hospital. There were no lights and no sirens until the ambulance reached the intersection roughly a 10th of a mile north of our houses, making a discreet exit from what we assumed was another of Dan Senior’s accidents.
Toots died that evening of a stroke.
I was away at college when Toots died. There was no funeral, no memorial service, just an obituary in the county paper announcing her cremation and date of death, something her children had published against her will in order to give one last testament to their mother. Her family spread her ashes over the farm, over her beehives and barns full of treasures, over the pond and the forest and her house, and that was the end of Toots, the beekeeper, the storyteller. When I came home for Thanksgiving break, my mom showed me her obituary, nothing more than a picture of someone I didn’t recognize and a short, formulaic set of paragraphs listing her hometown, date of death, and the surviving family members.
The months after her death were unusual. A fence went up around what used to be her front yard, and for the first time in a long time, our neighborhood didn’t feel quite right without Toots wandering in and out of our houses. There weren’t any neighbors stopping by, or anyone stopping me when I was outside to ask if I had written that best-selling novel yet. Toots no longer stopped to ask how my boyfriend was, the same high school sweetheart who used to fish at her lake for the Boy Scout derbies in middle school, or to send her congratulations to me through my grandma when Toots saw my name in the county paper for another accomplishment. “Toots says congratulations,” my grandma would tell me, “and to keep up the good work. She says that you’re going to really get somewhere the way you’re goin’.”
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The new neighbors spent most of the next two weeks moving into what used to be Toots’ house. On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, my dad went across the street to collect our newspaper and the day’s mail while one of the new neighbors mowed the grass with a push mower. We heard the sound of the mower starting earlier that morning, and I tried to hide my disbelief from our new neighbors at the attempt to mow that much yard with such a little mower. They were literally going to be there all weekend just mowing the yard I could see from the street.
Trying to be friendly, my dad made a joke to our new neighbor, a man in his late twenties with dark hair and an average build, who was trying to cut the grass in the ditch. “That’s a little mower for a big yard!” my dad called over the ruckus, his big booming voice a result of his training as an Air Force drill instructor during the Vietnam War coming in handy.
“Yeah, but it’s all I’ve got,” the man replied. The two introduced themselves and struck up a conversation. Our new neighbor’s name was Matt, age 28, and living in the house with his girlfriend, someone who remembered me from high school but I couldn’t place anywhere in my social circles of the time. I saw the petite woman a few days ago, holding the hand of a small child as they walked to the end of the driveway just to turn around and walk back to the house again. Between the two of them, they had six children but no kids together. As they talked, the oldest of the kids came out of the house and joined in on the conversation.
My dad, being the overgrown kid at heart that he sometimes is, asked the little boy if they heard anything about the alligator in the basement. “We went down the stairs in that basement and we didn’t see no alligator!” the little boy said. I watched the scene unfold as I walked through our living room on my way to the kitchen to help my mother put groceries away.
“Oh yeah,” my dad said, “The woman who used to live here had a pet alligator that lived in the basement! My wife Jenny can tell you all about it !”
“Yeah, but we didn’t see no alligator. I was mad,” the kid said. I watched as he folded his arms across his chest and pouted.
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Toots’s pet alligator was an Atwater legend that survived Toots’s death. Not much of note happened in my small hometown, founded on the land that a colonial officer was given in recognition of his service during the Revolutionary War. The alligator, though, became a local celebrity, even after the creature and its owner died.
As the story goes, Toots, Woody, and the kids went on vacation to Florida when my mom was still a little child, and while on their trip, they found a baby alligator in a gift shop and brought the hot dog-sized creature home in a plastic bag full of water. Apparently, at the time, bringing home a pet alligator from a Florida vacation was the cool thing to do, just like bringing home a goldfish from the county fair was the cool thing to do when I was a child.
At first, the Ryans’ kept the alligator in an aquarium, but as the creature continued to grow, the nameless alligator outgrew the aquarium. Eventually, the alligator took up residence in the Ryans’ basement underneath a heat lamp. The Ryans’ basement was already a maze, but a portion of the basement had been sectioned off by a cement half wall that, according to Toots, was big enough that the alligator couldn’t escape. This became the reptile’s new home. With its heat lamp, some water to lie in, and an ice chest filled with food, the only thing that could prompt the alligator to leave its new habitat was pure unadultered instinct or fear for its life.
By the time my mom knew of the alligator, it was a full-grown reptile that had developed a taste for the good life. As someone walked down the stairs into the basement, the alligator hissed unless it recognized the sounds of feet hitting the steps. Otherwise, it just stayed in its enclosure. “It was the laziest thing,” my mom recalled as she sat at the kitchen table the morning after my dad’s conversation with the little boy across the street, peeling apples for a pan of apple crisp.
When I was old enough to learn of the alligator, it was dead. After the animal died, Toots had the alligator stuffed and preserved by a taxidermist and placed in her basement, where the alligator continued to live on until Toots died. I’m sure, if I ever met the alligator’s acquaintance in real life, my bravery (or lack thereof) would not have allowed us to be friends.
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The most surprising—and slightly startling—change as our new neighbors settled in was the first sight of the school bus stopping at the house across the street. A school bus hadn’t stopped in front of our house, or really anywhere on our road, in years. Katie, before graduating from high school the summer before, drove herself to school after getting her license, and neither Erin nor I had ridden the bus in almost a decade. The first time I caught a glimpse of yellow and the whoosh of the air brakes releasing, I looked up and felt a little startled. The sight was familiar, yet unusual, but a sign that something was coming to life over there.
After the bus pulled to a stop, a little boy with brownish hair got off the bus, walked a few steps away from the bumper, and waited for the driver to signal that he could cross the road. He then walked across the pavement and ran down the driveway toward the back porch, his almost too big book bag bumping against his small body as he moved. He couldn’t have been older than first, maybe second, grade. This child was not the one who expressed his disappointment in the lack of an alligator in the basement to my dad.
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I miss my neighbor.
When I drive past her house while I’m home for holidays or graduate school breaks, the air feels different—a certain lyric no longer floats on the breeze. I don’t wave as I cruise past the place where the beehives used to be, imagining Toots’s ghost tending to her bees with nothing to protect her if the hives got angry. A light casting a steadier glow over the house and the driveway has replaced the constant flicker of the past security light on the pole at night. The outside and inside of the house are different. Toots’s house no longer looks like a log cabin, but is now another nondescript shade of beige.
All of her treasures—the lizard and her glass dishes and the fossils she kept in her barn behind her house—were sold to collectors and curious people at the local flea market.
The alligator disappeared.
The beehives are gone, down to the blocks that the wooden frames sat on to keep them off the ground. The new county beekeeper came and removed the hives the spring after Toots died.
I can still feel her presence sometimes because not only was Toots one of the people who taught me to be a keeper of stories, but also because she taught me what it really meant to embody a place. Toots became such a part of the place she found herself in—her house, her barn, her forest and lake and bees—that the place Toots built for herself died with her. The house across the road was never the same place again. Our little neighborhood in the middle of Northeast Ohio farm country didn’t feel like the same place.
When I go home to visit, I can still feel her presence sometimes. A quiet stillness sometimes settles over the land. Even the air stills. The birds come to rest in the trees and on the power lines. If I am lucky enough to catch this moment in my awareness, I find I can hear nothing except my own breathing, and that’s when I know that she’s there, asking me to pause and remember this place, the place where I am now and the place where my story begins.
Ashley Anderson is an essayist, writer, Ohio native, PhD student, and Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Missouri. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Peripheral Surveys, The SFWP Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, Badlands Literary Journal, The Manhattanville Review, Wraparound South, Newfound, Hive Avenue Literary Review, and Assay. She also holds MA degrees from Kent State University and the University of Cincinnati, as well as a BA in creative writing and journalism from Ashland University.