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The Unobservant Drone
By: Stephen Bishop
Beekeeping is mostly a matter of rearranging the contents of the hive to accomplish an apicultural objective without disturbing and irritating the inhabitants of the hive. In that regard, beekeeping is similar to housekeeping. My wife, who works full time and brings in the lion’s share of income, also does the lion’s share of housekeeping. It’s not fair, I know, but I try to pitch in, doing the dishes and laundry and other forms of domestic drudgery, but sometimes I still feel like a stranger, or maybe a tourist, in her interior domain.
“Do you live here?” my wife asks.
I suppose this is a rhetorical question. My wife, who prides herself on interior decoration, can often rearrange furniture without disturbing or irritating me, often without me even noticing. My wife has observed that I am “unobservant.” That’s fair. Still, I get the sense that many wives would covet a husband who could correctly identify a picture hanging in a different spot by the second guess, especially if he helped hang the picture. Plus, my first guess was partly right — she had painted the room a new variation of beige, just two years ago.
About once a year, I will accompany my wife on an organizing expedition into my closet. Really, it is a large wardrobe — our farmhouse was built in 1887 before the inventions of closets. It is hard to believe that eleven people once simultaneously lived in our house, without being smothered by garments, but I guess that is the point — each person didn’t have ten pairs of jeans, in various washes of blue, or five pairs of brown boots, or several dozen hats. I’m not sure why I do; I just seem to accumulate stuff through no fault of my own — in fact, I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a piece of clothing, and yet my wardrobe is stuffed full of textiles, or at least it is until my wife goes on a cleaning spell, at which point you better duck.
To my chagrin, she chucks out a lot of my favorite stuff, like my favorite t-shirts that are well-worn and soft (or as she likes to say, “tattered”) to free up space. Soon my wardrobe will have strict boundaries for each species of clothing, meaning my jeans and dress pants and t-shirts can no longer range together on the dowel rod. My wardrobe will be the center of all order in the universe, but the greater bedroom will look like a black hole just regurgitated. My role is to primarily stay out of her way and haul all of the jettisoned materials to Goodwill, so they can clutter up someone else’s wardrobe.
Decluttering is supposed to make life easier, but mostly it makes my life harder because my brain is programmed to find stuff in my current system of disorder.
“Where is my blue work shirt?” I ask.
“It is in the work shirt section.” she says, pointing to a piece of masking tape inscribed with a black sharpie. “See I labeled this section so you will know to always hang your work shirts here.”
“I wish you wouldn’t have done that,” I want to say, but I’m not stupid. “Thanks,” I respond instead. I suspect bees undergo a similar frustration when I move pollen frames around in an effort to free up space in the brood nest.
“Where did our all our yellow pollen grains go?” a worker bee asks.
“They are now two frames over,” another worker bee responds, “Look for the new labels over the hexagonal cells,”
“Oh, wow, I didn’t even notice,” an unobservant drone interjects.
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