This Gunch family is getting out of hand. It’s not enough my sister-in-law Gloriosa is raising chickens – chickens! – to keep up with the Uptown neighbors who also got them.
But now my son-in-law Slime is keeping bees, of all things. The kind that sting.
Yes, yes, I know that bees are very upstanding bugs because they pollinate the flowers and make honey and work well with others.
But they can do that somewhere else – not in your back yard where your mother-in-law might be walking around.
Besides, maple trees make real good syrup, too. And they don’t chase you down and sting you.
Now, I got to admit I myself have kept some little creatures around the house; dogs, cats, kids, a couple turtles and once a mouse. But never nothing that will take revenge if you accidentally disturb a flower that they’re on while you’re looking for your contact lens, and you have to wear your glasses over a big bump on your nose when you go out that night.
Gumdrop and Slime live in Folsom on the North Shore and Slime put the beehives down a hill at the very edge of the property and warned the kids to stay away.
He hikes down there every once in a while, to say hello and give them extra bee treats or whatever. Before he goes, he has to put a big white bee suit over his clothes with a screen over his face.
When he gets back, if you ask him how the bees are, he always says, “Busy as bees.” I could smack him one.
Anyway, today, a hot August day, Slime decides to go visit them again. He knows it’s hot, but he’s going anyway. You’d think he just wanted to get out of the house or something.
But instead of wearing his regular clothes under the bee suit, he strips down to his bathing trunks. That turns out to be a mistake. The more layers, the better with bees.
I happen to be there because I ain’t seen their kids in a while. My daughter got some errands to run, and she is getting ready to go, and I am going to babysit.
He goes out; the kids are building a Harry Potter castle out of Legos on the kitchen table; she is telling the kids goodbye.
Then somebody knocks at the front door and I open it on this little group of people with some kind of pamphlets and signs. But before I even get to hear whether they want to enlighten me about (politics or religion or who knows what) I hear squalling from the back yard. So I excuse myself and push the front door almost closed and rush to the back, and I see through the window at the top of the kitchen door that Slime is flailing on the back porch with bees flying all around him.
Gumdrop opens the door just a crack and he yells something about a “very aggressive hive” and to hand him some Off. She shuts the door and grabs the spray, and I grab another can of it and real quick spray it on me and the kids. Good thing I do, because when Gumdrop opens the door to hand it to him, the wind hits the door. It swings wide open. And in come the bees from the “very aggressive hive.”
Now we got a scene like a madhouse, with everybody running and slapping and throwing Legos and screeching. Well, naturally the people at the front are puzzled and they push the front door open and say, “Excuse us. Can we…YAHHHH!”
Because evidently these bees don’t actually want to be in the kitchen being slapped at, so they rush out the front door, and the people (solicitors? politicians?) stop standing there and run down the driveway yelling and slapping and jump in the car along with a few bees and drive off very erratically. A few yards down I see them stop and throw open the doors and run off in various directions.
I wonder what they wanted to say.
I hope it wasn’t something I agreed with them about.
