lessons in
The sun was thick and heavy. Stagnant, and seemingly suspended at around but never exactly twelve noon. It might have been any day that summer, those lazy days spent at the summer home in the country. After it was over, the entire season gelled together to be one hazy memory of between childhood and adulthood with the exception of a singular event that she would remember always: her first bee sting.
Lady was floating in a sea of grasses behind the house. The how and why of this she was never able to recall, just that she was there one early afternoon with a jar of honey and a piece of bread. At the winter home, the family's produce was store-bought in bright, generic packages, and all of it tasted faintly of dirt or ash or gunpowder, but at the summer home, Lady's mother's health would improve and she would bake. The honey was still store bought, but it was a different kind of store. Not the frigid chains of the city, but a quaint, family-run general store two miles down the road.
Lady was sitting in the middle of the grass field, her white cotton skirts spread out around her. She was listening to the hum of the electric lines at the back of the yard, the rustle of the grass through the breeze, and the slow occasional hum of cars passing on the distant highway. Lady would tear off a piece of bread, dip it in the honey, put it into her mouth, then chew, swallow, and sigh, all with a methodic repetition.
She was not afraid of the insects that were drawn to the food, in fact, the only thing Lady feared at all that summer was the Lafayette boy from five miles up the road, who had taken a childhood interest in her, wolfwhistling and making lewd gestures whenever the two would accidentally meet. Compared to him, Peter was his name, the ants and flies and gnats were much superior company.
The event of the sting, then, was quite unexpected. On some level, Lady must have known there were bees in the vincinity. The honey she ate must have come from somewhere, and her mother was forever warning of not straying too close to the rosebushes that let off a pungent, thick scent into the late evening air. But still Lady was surprised when a buzz, louder than the flies or gnats, drifted past her ear. She froze, one sticky warm bite held to her lips, and Lady felt her skin prickle in fear.
The bumblebee, which had been appearing to waft on by her, swerved suddenly, catching the scent of honey. It hummed its way to landing on the rim of the glass jar Lady had cradled amongst her skirts in her lap, then crawled in, investigating. It buzzed it's wings once, then twice, and spun in a small circle.
Lady put the honeyed piece of bread in her mouth slowly, chewed, and swallowed, never taking her eyes of the bee in her jar. She had half a mind to throw the honey jar away and flee back to the house, but fear kept her paralyzed where she was.
Another slight breeze came by, and the honeybee buzzed again before taking flight, up and out of the jar. Lady exhaled in a slight relief, but the bumblebee again caught the scent of nectar from her lips and headed straight for her. It landed on Lady's chin suddenly. Her entire body went rigid and still in terror. A faint, whimpering cry forced its way out of her mouth, and Lady's eyes watered. She was afraid.
The bee crawled in curly-q's to the edge of her mouth. It tasted the honey there and crawled further, until resting wholely on her bottom lip. Lovely cried out again, as best she could without moving her mouth or tongue. She had a sudden, intense moment of fear that the bee would crawl inside her mouth.
It didn't, however, seeming content to pick up the faint taste of honey off of Lady's lips. It was a tickling sensation as the bumblebee examined her skin, but Lady did not laugh. The bee flickered its wings, and finally Lady screamed in fright. It jabbed it's fatal stinger right into the flesh of her lips, and Lady screamed again, allowing the tears that welled in her eyes to spill over onto her cheeks. She sprung up as if a shot hand gone off, wiped the little bee's body from her mouth with a fast hand, and took off running as fast as she could into the house. The screen door slammed behind her.
Lady spent an entire week with a swollen lip from the sting, and an ego wounded from Peter Lafayette's teasing call of "haglip." She developed the habit of pressing her lips gently together to feel the pain of the healing beesting, and never outgrew it.