On Stings

Wasps, sleepless nights; the march of summer

The Warthog was stung by wasps the other day. They — without our consent — had been building a nest in the playhouse, and the Warthog had the bad luck to climb in just as they had gotten it established. He ran out screaming, covered in wasps — Mrs. CWD, Herculean, climbing one-handed into the playhouse, scooping and descending — the ladder? the rock wall? the slide? — to the safety of the ground, evading the sentinels, getting him to safety.

Happily, he came out of the situation with just a few stings and no allergic reaction; he was in pain, but not a pain unfixable by ice cream. A week or two later, though, at one in the morning, he woke up screaming, crying — “There are buggies in my bed! I don’t want the buggies to sting me!" And even after an inspection, a mock fumigation, and a shaking of the sheets, we couldn’t get him to go back to sleep. He spent the next four hours lying in bed next to us, kicking, twitching, stuck in a liminal space between fear and slumber — keeping Mrs. CWD and I up with him. At four-thirty, he got up again screaming, terrified of creeping things, and I finally took him downstairs; to avoid “the bugs,” we went into the basement, and while I worked out, he played and watched Tony Peterson hunt whitetail in North Dakota (“It’s okay deer,” he comforted after Peterson put an arrow through a mature doe from a ground blind).

He was in a daze during drop-off — having fallen asleep again at seven in bed next to Mrs. CWD and being abruptly awoken at eight — and I was no better after. I finished a meeting, then took a moment to recharge my batteries — sitting on the porch with my coffee. Our hydrangea bushes are in full bloom. Watched for five minutes, an hour, as the honeybees danced from flower to flower, shaking anthers and filaments, pollen and nectar, from the flowers. I watched one bee as she crawled — all bees outside the hive are females, by the way, and most in it, too — from flower to flower: pollinating, the falling stamens signifying an offering complete. Transfixed, I moved closer.

I watched as a bumblebee made her lazy circuit, far more docile, humble, humming. A dart, then, a rustle. Two sparrows. I watched them pirouetting and then they landed. One had a dragonfly in its mouth; I watched transfixed as the bird swallowed it — the second time in my life I’ve watched this happen. What omen does this portend? A vision? A threshold crossed — the mundane merging with the mythic? I watch the sky for further signs.

I’m eye-level now with the flowers. Not just bees and dragonflies, but beetles, hoverflies, diurnal lightning bugs. I look down and watch as a yellowjacket crawls along the mulch bed, stopping to wag its abdomen in the air, along the ground. It reaches and scrubs its forelegs against its head, but is otherwise still. Closer I look. It’s left wing is broken, sheared in half. A death sentence for a wasp, reliant on flight for food, for shelter, for purpose. In defiance — ignorance? — it continues to crawl, climbing a hydrangea leaf, falling, rising, crawling. A red-winged blackbird knells. Even in death, life goes on.

When I glance again, hours later: the wasp is unmoving, as if she’s finally fallen asleep.

This week has felt like a hinge in the middle of our summer. After the activity of June — a summer started — and travel over the Fourth of July, we didn’t do much at all this week. The kids swam, went to school; Mrs. CWD and I chauffeured them, worked. I wrote, some, placed some trail cameras. The flurry begins anew this weekend, with Nana and Grandfather CWD’s arrival North — then a calendar filled through September, at the earliest.

All excitement and good busy — is there such a thing? — but it’s busy nevertheless. We must take these opportunities to slow down when we can — give the taproot time to reestablish. The summer spirals ever onward, unyielding — the days drops in a bucket, threatening to overflow.

This weekend, we hope to pick blueberries. Kerpink, kerplank, kerplunk.