The Cemetery's Gold

Bee Hives Among the Graves

I’ve been walking in the graveyard lately in the mornings. Well, not all mornings. Not as many mornings as I intend to walk there. But some mornings.

It’s the Congressional Cemetery, which for years made me think it would be formal and rigid and dull, acre after acre of manicured lawn and punctuated by the headstones of senior congressmen from Illinois who spent their 26-year careers as Representatives without making terrible enemies or great friendships — without, come to think of it, doing much of anything at all.

But the graveyard turns out not to be like that at all. It’s full of eccentricities.

Headstones worn so flat by the weather that you mourn the person passed out of life and out of graven memory too. Art teachers who clearly asked for their headstones to be deliberately set askew. Dolley Madison is there, along with Marines band leader John Phillip Sousa.

DC’s infamous and beloved mayor (“Mayor for Life”), Marion Barry’s ghost might be hanging out with J Edgar Hoover’s ghost in the cemetery even as I write this. (Rather surprisingly, neither of their obituaries were available on the Cemetery’s website.)

There’s a jail overlooking it all, and it’s hard not to think about freedom when you’re out walking — the freedom to walk, perhaps the freedom from walking at all.

And in amongst all of this are the bees.

I happened among their hives a couple of weeks ago, and now I like to go visit them, even though it’s still too cold for them to be out and about much. (Bees start to wake up at around 55 degrees, and really get flying at around 65 degrees.) I’ve heard that there’s a tour of the hives that you can take later in the year, and that around Halloween, they harvest the honey under the name “Rest in Bees.” It sells out every year. I’d buy it, but I think I’d use it sparingly, in cocktails maybe, conscious of the recycling at work: the bodies turning into flowers, which attract bees, who make honey, which attracts us, people who are alive right now, who eat the honey and call it sweet.

As a side note, if you have never read the appalling, inspiring, sticky-sweet heartbreaker of a story of how the bees in Brooklyn turned red, and how that change led to the death of a good man, a drug raid, the inheritance unto a fourth generation of an Italian family business, and ten varieties of Maraschino cherries (plus crushed, plus halved), I highly recommend putting aside all your plans and reading it pronto.

I mentioned last week the cracking, creaking change towards spring, which I think always sounds hopeful, like “oh, here comes the next season.” I think those cracks can also sound like, “let’s just stay here and look at this change for a moment. Let’s examine it, shall we? Let’s see what it looks like right now.”

I guess that’s what I’m doing in the cemetery, trying to look at what it looks like right now, with the bees not yet flying, with the leaves not yet unfurling, but, perhaps, on the verge.

The havurah I attend — a Jewish fellowship, lay-led, without an official Rabbi but with many insightful attendees — happened to be thinking along the same wavelength this past week, and someone brought up an artist new to me, the Korean sculptor Yeesookyung. 

Artists of Colour @artistsofcolour

TRANSLATED VASE, Yeesookyung, 2013

Yeesookyung assembles discarded fragments of porcelain, gluing them together to make new vases and then fusing them with gold leaf.  In Korean, she notes, the word "geum" means both "crack" and "gold." 

Enjoy this gold in the world, enjoy the sweetness of its honey.

As always, have a wanderful week.