The Aerie

Yard Work

I was surprised that the wasp's nest was already vacant. For the past several weeks I've been pitching twigs at it from a great distance, trying to confirm that no winged sentinels waited to swarm on trespassers, but my intent was halfhearted and my aim never quite true. From the distance of the sidewalk I could manage to hit near the great gray football lodged beneath the eaves, but never quite on target. None of my throws, however close they came, elicited a response.

But what do I know about wasps? Not much. So I kept my distance, mindful of that day several years ago when my spouse came running into the kitchen, hornets clutching her like tiny, vicious infants that wanted nursing. If I recall correctly there were nearly 20 hornets on or about her person, and nearly 40 total that got into the house with her.

Earlier this summer I had used the long handle of the roof-rake to poke the softball-sized nest from a distance, knocking most of it loose. I wasn't stung, but that was only luck - one angry wasp instantly bulleted out of the nest to ricochet off my forehead, and I practically teleported into the back yard.

Now with the nest so much larger, I was taking no chances. However I was pretty convinced that it was empty, and from a somewhat nearer distance I managed to strike it with a small stone. No reaction.

Taking an old spatula I carefully scraped the nest out of the corner under the eaves and into a paper bag. It was quite fascinating - layer after layer of subtly-colored paper, gray and pale yellow and light blue. In the middle were the combs, like five small sunflower-heads, each hanging one from the other. Kind of amazing that wasps invented paper several million years before people did, and yet over all those years they managed not to clearcut the forests.

I left the hornet's nest for the kids to inspect, and went to clean off the siding. The nest had left a fingerprint of paper rings where it had adhered, which I scrubbed clean with soapy water.

Then it was on to the winter preparations. The weather was fine, sunny and not too warm, but not cool at all - hardly November weather. Many of the neighbors were out, cleaning gutters as I was, raking leaves as were my kids, or cleaning the garage just as was my spouse. It was such a nice day that slopping out the gutter mud was not as onerous a task as it could have been, as it has been in ears past. Icy cold mudwater and freezing winds make the chore miserable many years, but this time the work went quickly. I even re-mounted most of the heating coils that we use to prevent ice dams, coils which over the years have become dislodged by snow and rain.

By the time I finished, the family had finished much of the rest of the yard work. I looked on, satisfied. Years ago when the twins were born I had said, "Ten more years and I'll never have to mow the lawn again!" And thirteen years later, it's true! I don't have to mow, I don't have to rake, and this year I barely had to help clean the garage.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Hive removed, gutters cleaned, heating coils in place and the van parked in the garage for the first time in months, we're as ready as we can be for whatever winter might hurl our way. Global warming seems to be making our winters much more mild, but you never know - climate change leads to greater extremes, not a gentle overall increase. One of these days we could get another blast of bone-chilling cold like we haven't seen in years, or snow like the blizzards of 1991.

Those blizzards I shoveled out myself while the wife tended the infants. Nowadays I'd have company: two strapping thirteen year olds, my son in particular becoming tall, broad shouldered and powerful. He hung bikes in the garage today, not because he was asked to, just because he saw it needed doing and he realized that he could. I remember holding his body in one hand, pulling a teacup-sized stocking cap onto his preemie head through the sides of the incubator.

It's hard to contain oneself at times like that. It's hard not to shout for joy or start singing for sheer pleasure. This has to be one of the incommunicable secrets of parenthood, one of the things that cannot be explained but must be experienced. You can't TELL someone what it feels like to see the boy become a young man, to watch the squalling infant become a girl who turns up her nose at the notion of a high school that separates the concepts of computer technology and art.

When you're a kid the big secret seems to be sex - everyone's always talking about it, and it seems like it's supposed to be some great phenomenal thing for adults. But even the best sexual experience you ever had doesn't redeem your whole life the way watching your kids bloom does. If sex is the secret everyone talks about, it's also the most underwhelming. Most people's first time seems to end with "Is that it?" But parenthood, that's the secret nobody talks about, and the most overwhelming. It takes some practice, too - certainly when you've got a sqalling, pooping, puking infant on your shoulder, the same phrase comes to mind, "Is that it?"

It's not. It just keeps getting better and better from there. And then one day you're cleaning the yard for the winter, and your son casually hefts a bicycle onto its hook with a swiftness that makes your back twinge, and you realize that you're being replaced in the hierarchy of capable creatures, and it's alright, and it's more than alright, it's great, and it's right, and it's proper, and it really does kind of say that everything you've done, and every mistake, and every choice, and every effort you've exerted to get here, they were all right. They were all proper. They were all okay. They had meaning, because they brought you to this place, where youth becomes beauty and a chore becomes an opportunity to witness such a marvelous, humbling thing.

Posted by Albatross at November 6, 2004 8:17 PM