Helping Hands

December 1, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

A few years ago, at a beekeeper’s meeting, we had a medical emergency in which a speaker from out-of-town fainted. We had to call the ambulance. Turns out, it was an issue with low blood sugar, but at the time we didn’t know exactly what was happening. Luckily, there were several doctors and nurses in attendance who rushed to the speaker’s aid and cared for him until the ambulance arrived. While waiting, it took several minutes for us to track down a sugary substance to help him get his blood sugar back up—yes, in a room full of beekeepers no one had any honey. That got me thinking how important it is to know where emergency items are located in our meeting spaces. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, and defibrillators do no good if we can’t find them fast. Even something as simple as a piece of candy could save a life, at least if we can find it in time. The whole event reminded me that sometimes in life we’ve got to depend on the benevolence of strangers.

Depending on others doesn’t always come easy, especially for self-reliant types. Personally, I relish my farming and beekeeping pursuits because they do provide alone time—just me, myself, and the machinations of my mind. Granted, there may be nothing more dangerous than an idealist farmer who is the throes of agrarian reverie. Even Thoreau himself, the prophet of self-reliance, accidentally started a major forest fire, and in so doing, he depended on the townspeople of Concord to extinguish the blaze. It was definitely a blow to his ego, and afterwards some townsfolk bestowed him with the moniker “the fool who burnt down the woods.” It happens to the best of us.

Unlike Thoreau, who was merely trying to cook lentils on his campfire, I started a conflagration with the intended purpose of burning the vegetation in a field ditch that was encroaching on my line of bee hives. Over the years, the vegetation rooted in the ditch had expanded and grown unruly with antagonistic plants: briars, wild blackberry canes, poison ivy, etc. I dare not bush hog the ditch for fear of puncturing a tractor tire due to the spikes protruded from the wild Bradford pear trees. So I waited for a bright fall morning, dropped a match and watched as a wall of flames arose and traveled down the ditch, like a sizzling spark flowing down a line of gunpowder. Eventually, with the help of a major wind guest, my quaint little ditch fire detonated itself at the end of the ditch into a small grass fire, racing down the roadside.

Between the time concerned neighbors called 911 and the fire department arrived, my wife’s grandpa Lowry, who had been watching the proceedings from afar, jumped on a tractor, pursued the fire down the roadside, and smothered it with the repeated downward pressure of the front-end loader.

“Nothing to see here,” I assured the fire fighters a few minutes later when they arrived sirens blazing, but it was good to know they were there if I needed them. No man is an island.

In Defense of Compartmentalization

November 24, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

One drawback of the modern Sports Utility Vehicle is the fact that the trunk has been truncated into non-existence. Owning a SUV is like owning a house with an open floor plan. Sure, there is more space, but it is shared space, shared with all your cargo tumbling around in the back. Sometimes you hear the cargo tumbling, sometimes you smell it wafting, and sometimes you see it levitating in the rearview mirror (depending on how much air you got going over a speed bump). With a SUV, you have to live, or at least drive, in the presence of your possessions. You can’t just stuff boots in the back of your trunk and forget about them. With an SUV, your wife would eventually smell them.

With a car, however, your options are endless. I have been riding around with a pair of old muddy manure-caked rubber boots in the trunk of my Camry for at least four weeks–and my wife has never even detected a whiff. Nor can she smell the contents of my tackle box in the trunk. I don’t go fishing much anymore, but that is exactly the point. There is fish grime and scented power baits in that tackle box that date back to the previous century. Sometimes it is nice to have a hermetically sealed trunk.

And sometimes it’s nice to have compartments in life as well. One of my laments about modern society is that we can no longer compartmentalize. Everything is always open, always on, always accessible, always wafting into our heads, always vying for our attention. Through the conduits of wires and wifi comes an onslaught of electrons–emails, notifications, texts, videos, and social media posts–that bombard and erode the walls that protect our attention, focus, and sanity. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we found an old sedan somewhere, popped the trunk, and tossed our cell phones in there and forgot about them for four weeks. At the very least, we wouldn’t have to live with the manure wafting up from the screens.

According to statistics, the average American checks their phones 144 times a day, and the average American checks their email every 37 minutes. I suppose I’m an above average American because I check my email every 37 seconds. I’m not sure what I’m checking it for, but I’m checking it nonetheless. Companies are now selling containers, basically lockboxes with a timer on them, so families can incarcerate electronic devices and reduce screen time for both parent and child. In other words, they are literally selling compartments so we can recompartmentalize our lives.

Schools are also doing this. I guess educators realized that it’s probably not a good idea for students to be snapchatting with friends in English class when they’re supposed to be focusing in math class. In the past, such interdisciplinary communication was simply limited by classroom walls. Sure kids once passed notes in the hallway, but notes are a lot easier to police than electrons.

All this is to say, sometimes technological progress is a synonym for societal regress. Let’s bring back the sedan, with a nice hermetically sealed trunk.

Southerners and Soft Drinks

November 17, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Forget the rural-urban divide, college allegiances, or barbecue preferences, what splits North Carolinians into warring tribal camps has long been our tastes in carbonated sucrose. We have the mainstream, Coke versus Pepsi, divide, but two other soft drinks in North Carolina also have fervent followings: Cheerwine and Sundrop. The former was invented in North Carolina, in Salisbury, and the latter has been adopted as a native son, or native soda, and is certainly the soda of choice here in the foothills region. Some locals proselytize more than others. For instance, one farmer here often buys his temporary employees Sundrop. “When you buy Sundrop, excellent,” said a worker, who was from Mexico. “When I buy Sundrop, so-so.”

One thing that is somewhat confusing about the south is that coke can be both a specific and generic term. It could very well refer to a Coca-Cola, or it could refer to any Coca-Cola like alternative like Pepsi, or it could refer to any caffeinated and carbonated sugary beverage, like Sundrop or Cheerwine or Mountain Dew. Most likely, if someone tells you that they want a coke, they either want a Coca-Cola or, if that is not available, a Pepsi. But, if someone asks if you want a coke, they are likely using it in the general sense of any soft drink. If you respond “yes,” they will likely respond, “What kind?”

My wife’s grandpa, who died last year at the age of eighty four, always used the term dope as a generic term for soft drink. “Let me get a dope,” he would tell the waitress. The waitress, likely being born in a different millenia, would just smile nervously at him, as if he was senile. “He means a coke,” I would translate.

“Oh, ok, what kind?” she would ask, relieved.

“A Sundrop, if you have it,” he would say.

Apparently, dope was once the customary term for soft drink in western North Carolina. That usage, however, is becoming archaic, as evidenced by those puzzled looks on waitresses’ faces, and due to the fact that the people who used the term are dying off. My wife’s grandpa had an extra refrigerator in his utility room that he kept stocked with 2-liter bottles of Sundrop. He called it his “dope refrigerator.” He didn’t drink alcohol, but by golly he had a dope refrigerator, and he faithfully imbibed Sundrop till the day his very last days. Possibly, his heavy consumption of Sundrop over the years hastened his demise due to kidney failure. His doctor told him to “go easy on the stuff” but as far as I know that’s all he ever drank.

Before he died, my wife’s grandpa basically weaned our son, his great-grandson, on Sundrop. Thomas would toddle next door to visit, clamber up on a bar stool, and gulp down “tasty drink,” as he still calls it to this day. I’m not sure what the generic term for soft drink is in heaven, but hopefully some sort of tasty drink springs eternal there. Back here on earth, where time is limited, it’s likely less about what you drink or what you call it, but more about the time spent with the folks sipping dopes or cokes or tasty drinks. In his latter years, that’s something my wife’s grandpa seemed to know well–life is too short not to sit down and have a Sundrop with someone, even if it’s against the doctor’s orders.

Hallelujah: The First Frost

November 10, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

In the South, most people say “cut grass” instead of “mow grass.” Cut sounds a bit more aggressive and more accurately reflects our feeling toward vegetative maintenance after a long growing season. By the time our first frost date arrives, it seems like we’ve been cutting grass for a short eternity. I usually look forward to cutting grass in the spring, but by fall, it’s drudgery and my spring eagerness has turned into a general aversion toward chlorophyll.

Growing up, one of my first “jobs” was cutting yards with a push mower. I think this was supposed to instill in me a good work ethic, but mostly it started a pattern of poor life choices in regards to my means of generating income. Just to get my push mower to my main client, Mrs. Ernestine, meant I had to push it half a mile, uphill, past several houses with formidable canines. Most of these dogs were not well educated in laws regarding property lines or speed limits on public thoroughfares. I suppose it is rare for a push mower to break the speed limit, but you have to remember that the speed limit on small town streets was only fifteen miles per hour in those days, and I was a lot younger.

These days, even with a zero-turn riding mower, cutting grass is not merely as simple as jumping on the lawnmower, cranking up, and riding around in circles for a few hours. I’ve got to move all the stuff scattered around the yard—dead branches, Thomas’s bike and assortment of Fisher Price yard ornaments, and the cage traps I have deployed across the yard to try to thin out our local skunk herd. Then I have to walk to the barn to get my portable air compressor to pump up the front tire on the lawnmower. Then I have to fill up the lawnmower with gas. Likely, the gas can will contain ten drops, so I’ll have to journey to the gas station.

Some folks may wonder why I don’t just forgo grass in favor of a permaculture landscape. Rest assured, there is nothing more permanently cultured in my yard than wiregrass. You can’t kill it. If an asteroid plunged to earth and struck my house, in a matter of months the crater would be carpeted with wiregrass. It is an unstoppable force. Likely, that is why the dinosaurs went extinct—all the other vegetation withered away, and the dinosaurs just got tired of grazing wiregrass. Or, possibly wiregrass ate the dinosaurs.

The only thing that seems to phase wiregrass is frost. Hallelujah, we got our first frost last night.

a flat front tire and four empty gas cans–seems like a metaphor for my attitude toward grass.

Thoughts While Counting Ceiling Tiles

November 3, 2025November 3, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep, so I counted ceiling tiles. That’s when it dawned on me that perhaps the greatest discovery of all time was when a primitive biped, beset with an infinite number of stars to count in an expansive night sky, sought shelter in a cave and found counting stalactites by a dimming fire to be more conducive to falling asleep than counting stars. That is not to belittle the primitive biped; back then numbers didn’t go as high, hardly past twenty-three, so counting to infinity was a tough ask. Counting stalactites was more attainable, and thus mankind advanced to the caveman era.

After cave dwelling for a few eons, mankind progressed to the agricultural era. It was brought about primarily by the tanned-hide ceilings of tents. With nothing better to stare at than a tanned hide, early tent dwellers realized they could count sheep in their heads in lieu of counting stalactites or stars. Thus, humans started keeping sheep in fields where they lay, staring up at the ceiling of tents while enumerating their herds.

Eventually, humans wised up and realized they could stop counting and following sheep around and instead built more permanent domiciles with walls made out of sticks and stones and baked mud and ceilings made out of asbestos, both in smooth or popcorn form (I suspect popcorn ceilings arose from a subconscious desire to return to simplicity, specifically the rough ceilings of the stalactite era, when you needn’t need a thirty-year mortgage with a 6% interest rate to live in a cave).

Since then, ceilings have come and gone. At one point, high ceilings were popular, especially in old farmhouses that depended on airflow through windows as the primary cooling strategy. Then came the era of the ranch house, with low ceilings. Now vaulted ceilings with exposed beams are quite popular, especially old rustic beams with knots, a few termite trails, and wood borer holes–I think this aesthetic has something to do with the post-modern desire to sleep aboard a pirate ship. Maybe soon, we will have barnacled ceilings, with faux barnacles to count.

Sometimes it is good to remember that, beyond aesthetic considerations, the primary purpose of a ceiling is practical–for counting things when you can’t sleep. Some people still count sheep while trying to fall asleep as a vestige of the agricultural era (and some people actually still keep sheep, which is considered a more serious mental illness), but counting things at night is innately, if not exclusively, human. It is nothing to be ashamed about. It may be the only thing that separates humans from other lifeforms. Well, that–and the ability to laugh.