“Do you make your own honey?” someone asked.  I was at a book signing and had finished telling a story about taking the four kids to pick berries and how they help make raspberry jam.

“Oh, no,” I said and when the person looked surprised I had to explain.

Here is what I do: I have 4 kids who know to give up their seat on a train for someone old or injured or pregnant, 3 businesses that put good in the world even if they don’t make me able to fly 1st class, 1 beast of a dog who never growls, and 1 spouse who can play Chopin AND Air Supply and encourages me to sing even when I want to go to bed.

Here is what I do not do: keep bees, grow my own vegetables, or manage to keep more than 4 houseplants alive at any one time.  And I should note that one houseplant is on loan from my mother.  She let me borrow it ten years ago when I was staging our old flat to sell it.  I have not returned it and despite my best efforts to kill it, the plant is alive and well and living on the bookshelf.  The three other plants are ones I carried, wrapped in wet paper towel, on a plane from my grandma’s house in Florida.  Two aloe babies and one spider fern.  They are very small (like Grandma was) and forgiving (which she wasn’t) and now that she’s gone I feel pressure to keep the plants alive.

That’s just it. I am busy keeping alive all these people and businesses and I can’t possibly have to go check on bees and worry about them. Anyway, I’d probably be the batty lady who reads to her bees if I had them.

So, for now, no raised beds of veggies and no beehives.

PS If it makes you feel better, my friend harvested this honey from his own bees.  AND his bees speak Italian.