Sue Bee Honey

Once a year, their trucks would leave trails through our fields of sweet clover and my father returned from the fields with  combs of honey still in their wooden frames, dripping rich streams that blackened the dust of  the sidewalk between the back driveway and the porch, where he propped them up against the porch railing to drain into huge clay bowls.

Sue Bee Honey, rich and golden and speckled with tiny corpses of the bees who made it. Those two purloined combs were the price he exacted for allowing them to put their hives onto our land. I swear I could smell that honey on the wind long before he brought it back to share with the family—our year’s supply that we would filter through screens to remove broken bits of wax and bee bodies and pour into bottles to line a foot-long space on the narrow shelves of the pantry.

I remember breaking off a piece of the broken comb to chew like sugared gum—sweet July memories of summer as well as later memories of the silken feel of that honey trailed onto hot buttered corn muffins in the morning. It solved my winter hunger for sweet and fueled me up for a morning of  books and chalkboards and sharpened pencils on blue-lined rough yellow paper.

The prompt words  for  The Sunday Whirl, Wordle 538 are: broken silk dust leaving truck family sign hunger wind books honey and black. Two of the images are by  Alisa Reutova and Mariana Ibanez  on Unsplash.