Sherry Chandler » Locust blossoms
Locust blossoms
A couple of revelations snuck in this morning when I wasn’t looking.
The locusts are in full bloom. Always a sweet time of year, the locust blooming. They smell sweet as lilacs and cover our driveway with their snowy fall.
My uncle, the one who featured in “Walking Taft Highway,” used to be renowned for his locust honey. I didn’t manage to get that in the poem. Perhaps another one, some day. Like Raven’s Shadow, I feel a need to record these things that will soon be lost.
That is another thing World War II took away from my uncle. While he was away, other family members watched over the bees. One got over-ambitious, wanted to expand, and bought in an infected hive. There were always a few hives around when I was growing up, but the honey business was never quite the same, and I don’t think I ever even saw the separator run. The place we called “the bee house” was just a sweet-smelling mystery to me.
And now honey bees are in trouble all over. We never see them on our place, though we used to have a wild bee tree on the back line fence. Bumble bees in plenty and what my Dad used to call “study bees” (they hold study in flight, like a humming bird), but no honey bees. If I could retire, I’d like to learn to mind a hive, just to have the bees. I don’t like honey.
And this Saturday is Kentucky Derby Day. It’s always this way with me and the Derby. Kentucky’s biggest annual event and I am oblivious until the day is upon us. I could be really clichéd I guess, and say I don’t march to the drum of hoofbeats. I’ve been far more interested in the fact that Seamus Heaney is coming to the University of Kentucky this weekend. He’ll read at the old King Library on Friday evening at an event honoring the Irish Nobel Laureates: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney and receive an honorary degree and speak at commencement on Sunday.
Rumor has it that he’ll go the the Derby on Saturday, which is what made me realize that the Derby is on Saturday. Perhaps that’s what brought him to Kentucky in the first place. I am thrilled and impressed that Mr. Heaney is being so honored by U.K., but I don’t understand the connection. (Maybe he thought UK stood for United Kingdom?)
But mine is not to reason why. Mine is just to see if I can get an autograph on my copy of Mr. Heaney’s translation of Beowulf (Faber and Faber, 2002). If you remember Beowulf as something stodgy you had to read in English lit, take a look at this translation.
[Note: Well, we do have an Irish professor, Jonathan Allison, on faculty here who is director of the Yeats International Summer School at Sligo. ]
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