Diane's Porch

Colony

Chapter 12: Diane's Porch

The porch faced west. It was a covered porch, the overhang deep enough to sit under in the rain, which mattered in the Willamette Valley where rain was not an event but a condition, where the porch was not a luxury but a room, a third space between inside and outside, between the domestic and the agricultural, between the house where you ate and slept and the land where you worked and the porch where you sat in the evening and looked at the land you had worked and drank the beer you had earned and did not think about the mortgage or the equipment loan or the price of hazelnuts or the weather forecast or the seven hundred things that a farmer thought about during the working day and that the porch was designed to release, to let go, to set down the way you set down the tools at the end of the day, the tools going on the shelf and the thoughts going somewhere else, somewhere that was not the porch, because the porch was for the beer and the view and the company if there was company.

There was company. Meg sat in the Adirondack chair on the left side of the porch. Diane sat in the Adirondack chair on the right side. The chairs were cedar, weathered gray, built by Diane's father thirty years ago from lumber milled on the property from trees cleared for the first hazelnut planting, the chairs a byproduct of the orchard the way honey was a byproduct of pollination, the secondary thing produced by the primary thing, and the chairs had outlasted Diane's father, who had died in 2019, and had outlasted Diane's marriage, which had ended in 2019, the year of two endings, the year Diane referred to as "the year everything that was holding things up stopped holding things up."

The beer was from a brewery in McMinnville, a pale ale, local, the bottles in a cooler on the porch between the chairs, the cooler a blue Coleman that had belonged to Diane's ex-husband and that Diane had kept because the cooler was functional and the keeping of a functional object from a failed marriage was not sentiment but pragmatism, was the farmer's economy of use, the principle that said: it works, I need it, the history of the object is irrelevant to its function. Diane applied this principle to most things. Diane applied this principle to everything except the one thing to which it could not be applied, which was the memory of the marriage itself, which was not functional, was not useful, was not an object that could be repurposed, and which Diane carried not on the porch but in the space behind the eyes where the things you did not talk about lived and waited and occasionally surfaced in the form of a sentence that came out sideways, angled, aimed at the view rather than at the listener.

The view was the valley. From Diane's porch, which was on the rise above the valley floor, you could see the hazelnut rows — twelve hundred trees in thirty rows, the rows running north-south, the trees in full leaf now, July, the green canopy dense and dark, the nuts developing in their husks, the husks in clusters of three or four on the branches, the nuts not yet ripe, not yet ready, the harvest two months away — and beyond the hazelnuts the grass seed fields and the vineyards and the far line of the coast range, the hills blue in the evening light, and the sky above the hills the particular salmon and gold of a Willamette Valley sunset, the colors produced by the marine air from the coast mixing with the valley air, the moisture scattering the light into the spectrum that painters tried to capture and that photographs failed to render and that the eye registered with the particular pleasure of a thing seen so many times that the seeing had become a form of possession, the sunset owned by the seeing of it, the view the property of the viewer.

"How are the bees," Diane said.

"Good. The flow is tapering. Blackberry is finishing. The supers are heavy."

"Good year?"

"Good year. Better than last year. The spring was warm enough to build population and wet enough to keep the clover going into July. The combination is right."

"The combination is right," Diane repeated. She drank her beer. She looked at the view. "That's the whole thing, isn't it. The combination. You can have the rain and not the warmth and you get nothing. You can have the warmth and not the rain and you get nothing. You need both. You need the things at the same time."

Meg drank her beer. She did not respond because the response was implicit, was the beer, was the sitting, was the two of them on the porch in the evening doing the thing they had been doing for ten years, the thing that had become the structure of their friendship, the weekly or biweekly evening on the porch that served the same function as the smoker — the mediating ritual, the thing that created the conditions for proximity without requiring the vulnerability of direct approach, the porch being the space where they could sit side by side and look at the view rather than at each other and say the things they said in the register they said them, which was the register of crops and weather and the practical concerns of women who ran agricultural operations alone and who spoke about their aloneness in the vocabulary of their operations rather than in the vocabulary of their feelings.

"I had the arborist out last week," Diane said. "The old Barcelonas in the north block. They're dying. The blight finally got them. I knew it was coming — I've been managing it for ten years, the copper sprays, the pruning, but the blight doesn't quit. The blight is patient. The blight waits for you to get tired of fighting and then it takes the trees."

"Are you pulling them?"

"I'm pulling them. Next spring. Pull the Barcelonas, replant with Yamhill. Five years to first harvest. Five years of no income from that block." She drank. "Five years is a long time to wait for nuts."

"But you'll wait."

"I'll wait. What else am I going to do? Not plant? Leave the block empty? The empty block doesn't produce income either. At least the planted block has a future. The empty block is just — empty."

The word sat between them. Empty. The word that applied to the hazelnut block and that applied to the houses and that applied to the evenings and that applied to the particular condition of women in their fifties who had been married and were no longer married and who lived on properties that had been designed for two people and were now occupied by one and whose days were structured by work that required all of their attention and whose evenings were structured by nothing, by the absence of structure, by the void that opened at the end of the working day when the tools were put away and the boots were pulled off and the house received them with the particular silence of a space that had no one in it to receive them.

Meg knew the word. Meg lived the word. Meg did not say the word because saying it would have been redundant, would have been naming a condition that they both inhabited and that they both understood and that the naming would not have changed or improved or illuminated, the naming being the thing that people who had therapists did and that people who had porches did not, because the porch served the same function as the therapist — the regular appointment, the dedicated space, the permission to speak — but served it in the agricultural register rather than the clinical register, served it with beer rather than with tissues, served it with the view rather than with the eye contact, and the view was better, the view was the valley and the sunset and the hazelnut rows and the distance that allowed the personal to be said as if it were the professional.

"The hardest part wasn't losing him," Diane said.

She said it looking at the view. She said it in the tone she used for crop reports, for weather observations, for the flat declarative statements of fact that constituted her conversational style, the style that Meg recognized because it was her own style, the style of women who had learned that directness was suspected and that indirection was strength and that the most effective way to say a thing was to say it as if it were about something else.

"The hardest part was realizing the farm was better without him. Because that meant I'd been carrying dead weight and calling it partnership."

Meg drank her beer. She looked at the sunset. The salmon was deepening to coral, the gold to amber, the colors shifting the way colors shifted, gradually, without announcement, the transition visible only if you looked away and looked back, the change imperceptible in the continuous viewing but obvious in the interrupted viewing, the way all change was obvious when you stopped watching and then started again.

"He didn't like farming," Diane said. "He married a farmer and he didn't like farming. He liked the idea of farming. He liked the property and the house and the view from the porch and the dinner parties where he could say 'We grow hazelnuts' and the 'we' made him a farmer without requiring him to farm. But the farming — the pruning and the spraying and the harvesting and the equipment maintenance and the up-at-five and the mud and the rain and the seven hundred decisions a day that nobody thanks you for making — the farming, he didn't like. And I didn't see it. Or I saw it and I pretended I didn't see it because seeing it would have meant making a decision and the decision would have been: this is not a partnership, this is a woman farming and a man living on a farm, and the distinction matters."

Meg did not respond. The not-responding was the response — the silence of a woman who recognized the truth but was not ready to say it aloud. The silence of a woman who heard in Diane's words the echo of her own experience, the echo that was not exact, that was transposed into a different key, Diane's marriage being different from Meg's marriage in the specifics but similar in the structure, the structure of a partnership that was not a partnership, the structure of two people occupying the same space without occupying the same life, the cohabitation that looked like marriage from the outside and felt like roommateship from the inside, the roommateship of two people who had stopped doing the thing that made them partners and had started doing the thing that made them cohabitants, which was nothing, which was the absence of the thing, which was the pheromone fading, which was the signal weakening, which was the colony's assessment that the queen was failing and the colony's failure to build queen cells.

"Do you miss him," Diane said.

The question was asked in the tone of a woman asking about the weather, the tone that defused the question's charge, the tone that said: this is a question about a factual state, not an emotional state, and you may answer it or not, and the not-answering will be accepted with the same equanimity as the answering, because the porch is a space where silence is not rude but is simply silence, is simply the view, is simply the evening doing what the evening does, which is darken.

Meg considered the question. She considered it the way she considered a frame of brood — carefully, diagnostically, looking for the pattern, the tight oval or the scattered gaps, the indicator of health or the indicator of decline.

"I miss the structure," Meg said.

It was the most she had said about Gavin on the porch. It was, possibly, the most she had said about Gavin to anyone. The words came out sounding different from how they had existed in her head, the way all spoken thoughts sounded different from unspoken thoughts, the vocalization altering the thought the way extraction altered honey — the substance was the same but the form was different, the honey in the comb and the honey in the jar being the same honey but being different, the comb-honey having a texture and a context that the jarred honey lacked, the context of the wax and the cell and the frame and the hive, the context stripped away by extraction, the honey standing alone, and the words standing alone, without the context of the years of thinking them and not saying them and holding them in the comb of her mind.

"The structure," Diane said.

"The meals. The schedule. The morning and the evening. Knowing someone would be there when I came in from the apiary. Not needing them to say anything. Not needing them to do anything. Just — there."

"There."

"There is structure. There is a frame. You hang your day on it the way you hang your day on any structure — the work, the meals, the sleep. And when the person is gone, the structure is gone, and the day doesn't have the thing to hang on, and the day is just — the day. Just the hours. Just the light and the dark. Just the empty frame."

Diane was quiet. The quiet was the porch's contribution to the conversation, the silence that the porch provided the way the valley provided the view and the evening provided the light and the beer provided the warmth, each element contributing to the conditions that allowed the words to be said, the specific environmental conditions of the porch conversation — the temperature, the light, the beer, the view, the side-by-side arrangement of the chairs that precluded eye contact — all of these conditions combining to create the space in which Meg could say "I miss the structure" and have the saying be received without response, without analysis, without the follow-up questions that would have turned the saying into a conversation about feelings and that would have closed the door that the saying had opened, because the door was fragile, the door was the kind of door that opened only under specific conditions and that closed at the first sign of scrutiny, the door of a woman who had been raised by women who did not discuss feelings and who had married a man who did not discuss feelings and who had built a life in which feelings were expressed not through discussion but through work, through the daily practice of tending things, through the care of organisms that required care and that did not ask to be told about the feelings that accompanied the caring.

The sunset finished. The sky went to gray and then to dark and the stars appeared, the summer stars, Vega and Altair and Deneb, the summer triangle, the stars that Meg knew by position if not always by name, the stars that she saw every summer evening from every porch and every apiary and every roadside where she stopped the truck to check a hive, the stars that were the same stars her grandmother had seen from the porch of the farm in Polk County, the stars that were indifferent to the women who looked at them and that were beautiful in their indifference, beautiful the way the bees were beautiful, the beauty of organisms and objects that did not know they were beautiful and whose beauty was therefore unconditional, unperformative, unaware.

"I like your Luz," Diane said.

The statement arrived without preamble, without connection to what had come before, except that the connection was there, was implicit, was the associative logic of the porch conversation that moved from topic to topic not by transition but by contiguity, the topics adjacent in the mind if not in the conversation, the way the brood was adjacent to the pollen on the frame, the two areas touching without merging, each distinct but each related, each part of the colony's architecture.

"She's good," Meg said. "She learns fast. She asks the right questions."

"She looks at you like you're the answer."

Meg drank her beer. She did not respond to this. She did not respond because the response would have required her to acknowledge something that she had noticed and had not examined, the way Luz looked at her when she explained the waggle dance or the mite treatment or the queen's pheromone, the look that was not the look of a student at a teacher but was the look of a person at a person, the look that said: I see you, not just what you're showing me, I see the thing behind the showing, the person behind the practice, the woman behind the beekeeper, and the seeing was visible and was unsettling and was the thing Meg did not examine because examining it would have been the queen check, the opening of the hive, the looking for what was there, and Meg was not sure she wanted to find what was there.

"She's my apprentice," Meg said.

"I know what she is."

"She's learning beekeeping."

"I know what she's learning."

"Diane."

"Meg."

They sat. The dark settled. A bat flew over the porch, the quick erratic flight path of a bat hunting moths in the porch light, the bat visible as a silhouette, a flicker, and then gone, and Diane reached into the cooler and opened two more beers and handed one to Meg and the handing was the topic change, was the signal that said: I have said what I was going to say, you have not-responded as I expected, the conversation has reached the point where it needs to turn or end, and the beer is the turn, the beer is the new paragraph, and Meg took the beer and the topic changed.

"The market starts next week," Diane said.

"I know. I need to bottle."

"You selling the same varieties?"

"Wildflower. Maybe a batch of clover if I can keep it separate. The clover sells for more."

"People like the word 'clover.' It sounds pastoral. 'Wildflower' sounds pastoral too but 'clover' sounds more specific. People trust specific."

"People trust specific because specific means someone is paying attention. If I say 'wildflower,' it could be anything. If I say 'clover,' it means I know what my bees are working. It means I'm watching."

"You're always watching."

"That's the job."

"That's not just the job."

Meg drank her beer. The valley was dark now, the hazelnut rows invisible, the property defined by the porch light and the house light and the faint glow of the barn light that Diane left on for the cattle, the light that was not enough to see by but was enough to navigate by, the minimum illumination of a farm at night, the light that said: someone lives here, someone is here, the farm is occupied, the farm is tended, the farm continues.

"You should come over more," Diane said. "Not just for the bees. Not just for the contract. Just — come over. Bring Luz. I'll make dinner."

"You don't cook."

"I heat things up. I have a microwave and a strong opinion about frozen lasagna. Stouffer's, Meg. It's not cooking but it's dinner."

Meg smiled. The smile was small and private, the smile of a woman who did not smile often and whose smile was therefore weighted, was significant, was the rare bloom of a plant that flowered once a year and whose flowering was notable precisely because of its rarity.

"Maybe," Meg said.

"Maybe is progress. Maybe is the first rung of the ladder. Last year I would have gotten 'no.' The year before I would have gotten silence. Maybe is practically a 'yes' by your standards."

"Maybe is maybe."

"I'll take maybe."

The evening ended the way it always ended, not with a goodbye but with a departure, Meg standing and placing her empty bottle in the recycling bin beside the door and walking to the truck and driving home in the dark on the county road, the headlights on the asphalt, the road empty, the valley sleeping, the farms dark, the houses dark, the bees in their hives in the dark, and Meg drove home and the driving was the decompression, was the transition from the porch to the house, from the company to the alone, from the conversation to the silence, and the transition was not abrupt because the porch had prepared it, had tapered the social into the solitary the way the evening had tapered the light into the dark, gradually, naturally, without the sudden shift that would have been jarring, and by the time Meg pulled into the driveway and parked the truck and walked to the house she was already back in the alone, was already in the solitary register, was already the woman who lived alone in the house that smelled of honey, and the alone was familiar, was the known territory, was the hive she had been living in for two years.

But the beer was warm in her stomach. And the evening was in her. And the words she had said — "I miss the structure" — were in the air behind her, released, spoken, no longer held, and the release was not relief exactly but was a lightening, a reduction of weight, the way the hive was lighter after the honey was pulled, lighter but not diminished, lighter because something had been taken out that needed to come out, the surplus that was not serving the organism, the stored substance that had been accumulating and that needed to be removed so that the organism could continue, and the words were the surplus, and the speaking was the extraction, and Meg went inside and the inside was the same — one plate, one mug, the television she did not turn on, the bed she got into alone — and the same was the same but the same felt different, felt lighter, felt like a hive after the honey was pulled, the space opened, the frames empty, the cells ready to receive whatever the next flow would bring.