The Bees

I love our home. It's a comfortable house for our family. We bought it years ago and have done many repairs, replacements and so on. I'd like to have a month where we do not have some kind of repair bill. I'm facing a new dishwasher soon, etc.

I've never lived in a new home. I grew up in a house built in the '20s and have lived in a succession of dorms, apartments and homes built long before I thought of them.

Our home has a history, of course. The neighbors remember the family who built the home in the 60's and the family who re-modeled it 20 something years ago. In that re-do, the family added a greenhouse which in it's day was quite the thing. The greenhouse is standing but is a shadow of it's former glory. It's a big building with a gravel floor in the greenhouse part, cement slab in the tool/lawnmower section and an additional cement floor for further storage. I'm not saying it's a British conservatory although it is a well thought out building. The greenhouse portion has slat tables for potting, a heater for the winter, fan for the summer, water hoses, etc.
Even has a phone connection from the days when a previous owner taped his spouse to see if she was whooping it up outside of marriage. (The rumors of her infidelity blew around town and have stayed in the provincial imagination after all these years with an old lady asking me if it was true that we had a mirrored ceiling in our bedroom. Nope.)

The greenhouse is on it's last legs. During the last big Blow, part of the roof sailed away. The doors were removed last Spring for some reason never explained to me by my LH and lovely children. Rather than being a pleasant place to pot plants, the greenhouse has turned into the dump for those things we keep for no reason and those we may need in the future. I am thinking of the load of french doors buried under broken yard furniture which we salvaged for some reason. Even though we unloaded a majority of stuff from the greenhouse when we had a chance last Spring, the space has filled up again. I wonder if junk walks in there at night when no one sees it.

As Spring comes to the Backwater and our piece of God's Good Earth, the carpenter bees arrive. These are big fat black bees who travel in pair and look like floating mini tootsie rolls. Their reason for living is to bore holes in untreated/unpainted wood while dripping a yellowish pollen and lots of wood dust. I love watching them. They bore round holes then bore at an angle, hibernate/reproduce then come back when the weather is warm. I see them in the Spring and Fall only. I've read that they do not sting but haven't messed with them to find out. Their buzzing is loud which makes me think they don't want me standing close enough to see if they bore at an angle.

Their temporary business then absence is a good sermon illustration. So is their ability to bore what looks like a perfect hole. It's amazing to me that God created such a thing as carpenter bees. I spend a good bit of time thinking about how bees and all other living things live together and how we share the same Creator. If I did not see the bees, I wouldn't know they exist. I wonder what I am missing of God's plan and involvement because I do not see.

I cannot wax eloquent about roaches, fleas, flying cockroaches, fire ants, gnats and mosquitoes. I'm not sure I would have made these creatures. It's beyond me to know the mind and purpose of God.

What's going on with you?