September 2015 - Barn Dancing and Black Pirate Honey

Last Saturday night we walked to a barn dance. We left our cabin and headed West through our orchard under a nearly full moon. With rose briars clutching at my skirt, Zach lifted me over the wooden fence that frames our neighbor’s horse pasture and we approached the old homestead from behind. This house was once the home of the family that owned our property, the people who built our stone walls and left their old farm implements to rust in our fields. Now the doors of their huge barn were flung open, the inside laced with strings of lights and the sound of a fiddle and dulcimer pouring out.  It seemed all the ghosts of their family graveyard were there with us, strolling through the backyard under the heavily-laden apple trees. As if hosting a neighborhood barn dance is what this homestead was meant to do; it had been sleeping, and now had a reason to wake.  We ate with our neighbors and danced together across the uneven floorboards. The fiddler played Saint Anne’s Reel and her partner called out the steps. For one of the dances I surrendered Zach to a nice lady who had come alone; the musicians dove into the Tamlin and blended it with an American tune I hadn’t heard before.  Then I requested “La Bastringue” and we did it properly, raising our joined hands for a big whoop each time we met up in the middle. The musicians sent us out with a beautiful waltz. It was still playing in my head as we picked our way back home through the pasture and under the barbed wire to one of our forest paths.  Our log cabin glowed warmly as we approached, a humbler building than the chateau-like house and barn we had left behind, but small and sturdy on its ledge hill.  

The next night, last night, we harvested the tiny bit of honey we felt we could take from our bees after such a strange summer. The honey was dark, almost black, and tasted like caramel. Zach said it was knotweed honey. It it is entirely different from the floral, wine-y honey we harvested at midsummer last year.  The kids helped us spin the black, heavy heart out of the combs, then we put them to bed. After they were asleep I finished reading “Cinnamon and Gunpowder,” a novel about a chef who is captured by a redheaded lady pirate and forced to cook for her. It was a rich, sweet, dark story.  As we slowly filled our bell jars with the viscous liquid we had just harvested, the earth’s shadow slid dark red over the moon in a full lunar eclipse “supermoon” – the first since 1987. When a thin crescent of light reappeared, it shone through the sunroom window onto the new jars of black pirate honey.

I turned 40 this year. I, too, feel richer, darker, and sweeter. I am right where I want to be at this moment. Zach and I celebrate 13 happy years of marriage tonight, and my father turns 74. Many dreams are coming true for the people around us: my friend Andrea and two of my cousins have found true love, the Boghs have found their homestead on a hill in town, and my sister has seen the first client in her new business. I pray for our friends who are still waiting or searching, whether it is for love, or the gift of a child, or a place that feels like home: may this be the year.  And although the world is facing much darkness right now, may we pull together – as we do in a New England winter – to help each other through regardless of our differences.