The drought persists. Somehow we missed our 73% chance of rain on Tuesday, which is more evidence that math is fake. Another reason math is fake is because I spent $800 on grass and clover seed this fall, and my truck bed still looked empty and my tires barely bulged under the payload of a few overpriced seed sacks. It’s as if numbers don’t mean anything anymore. In fact, I think my eight hundred dollars would have been more valuable as kindling for my bee smoker. I planted the seed back in early September and it has yet to germinate, which is possibly a blessing in disguise. Had it germinated, the seedlings would have shriveled up faster than fatback in a frying pan. There is still a chance that, given some rainfall, I can recoup my expenses by actually growing forage for cows, though at this point I’d probably have better odds of indemnification by attempting to rob a bank.
The one bright spot in the drought is the brightness of the dying foliage. I can’t remember a year when the maples were as orange, the oaks as scarlet, and the poplars as lemony as this particular year. On more than one occasion this fall, my wife, who is much more artistically inclined than I will ever be, has gasped at the color of a roadside tree. I wouldn’t know a Monet from a Michelangelo, unless the latter was a mutant turtle, but even I can appreciate the orangeness of the maples this year. It’s as if the ground, in all its droughty drabness, is merely meant to contrast with the foliage above, to frame Mother Nature’s masterpiece.
Desperate times call for desperate action. I’ve left my car windows down, painted an outbuilding, and even hung up a few garments on the old clothesline–just to tempt the atmosphere into relinquishing a few rain drops. The whole countryside looks drab, like someone siphoned the chlorophyll out of the pastures and hayfields. We haven’t had any substantial rain since early September. But give it a few months, and the pendulum will have probably shifted and we’ll be boarding an ark. It seems like it’s always one extreme or the other.
Somehow, in their infinite wisdom, the folks who monitor and declare drought stages have finally found it within themselves to bestow us with an official “severe drought” designation. “Abnormally Dry,” they said for months. There will be no fall flow this year, not that that’s abnormal. Occasionally, when I was a beginning beekeeper, I heard old timers mention fall flows and hives smelly and filled with goldenrod and aster honey. We still get the smelly socks aroma from traces of aster nectar, but a hive bursting with fall honey is about as rare as a raindrop these days. In the thirteen years I’ve been keeping bees, I don’t think I’ve ever had a fall flow that fills supers.
Ten years ago, we bought the old farmhouse. My wife’s grandfather, who was born in the house, is eighty-five and likes to tell stories about the olden days when the family had hog killings in January, bled carcasses on the branch of a mammoth barnyard oak, and hung hams in the smokehouse. Eventually, they quit raising hogs because they were losing too many hams in the winter due to warm spells.
Hams don’t lie, I suppose, and neither do honey supers. The climate is changing. And the landscape is too. Housing developments are spreading faster than kudzu, and as much as I can’t begrudge people a place to live (I guess everyone can’t live in a house built in 1897), I don’t like it much either, just like I don’t like 85 ℉ days at the end of October.
Sometimes I wish I could have seen the countryside in its prime, back when it was dotted with farmsteads, not sprawling developments named after farms. Having tried my fair share of farming schemes, I’m not naive enough to believe it was a better or easier time, but I’d like to think it was a slower time when things didn’t change quite so fast. Or maybe change has stayed the same, and I’m just getting older and time is speeding up. Either way I don’t like it. I wish it would stop.
As farm animals go, cattle have it pretty good. Most of them roam free and forage in green pastures before they’re loaded in a trailer, paraded through a series of chutes and gates, and admitted to a feedlot to finish out their days. If I had to be a farm animal in our modern food system, I’d rather be a beef cow than a broiler or hog.
As Americans, most of us have it pretty good too. We live out our lives in freedom in a land of abundance before we get loaded in an ambulance, paraded through a series of elevators, hallways, and doors, and admitted to a hospital or healthcare facility to finish out our days. I don’t think I’ve ever commiserated so much with livestock as I have in the last few months during my brief encounters with our healthcare system. I’ve now experienced being funneled through hallways and into offices and operating rooms, all while being bombarded with waivers and forms and nonsensical medical verbiage. The whole process is both dizzyingly efficient and dazzlingly obtuse. Indeed, the only other system that comes close to rivaling both the industrial efficiency and purposeful obfuscation of our farm system is probably our healthcare system.
Indeed, I’m pretty used to various makes and models of manure, but the stench wafting off of hospital bills is pure bs. A few months ago, I had an endoscopy and colonoscopy done at a hospital outpatient center. I was promptly greeted at 5:30 A.M. with a friendly hello from the receptionist who then cheerily tells me that, according to their estimates of my insurance coverage, my portion to pay for the facility fee is only $730. It could be worse I think, so I pay it and go about my business of trying to contain my bowels. And that’s where they get you. You’ve already committed to drinking a gallon of laxative, so you’re going to pay up. The problem is they’re not going to pay you back for overcharging (turns out, my facility fee copay should have been $80–their estimate was merely off by 900%) unless you descend into the worse version of yourself, the frustrated version that finally snaps and yells at customer service reps on the phone. That is what it takes to claw back money from them, if you ever notice you’ve been overcharged in the first place. I bet most people just prepay the facility fee and never realize they’ve been overcharged because the whole billing and insurance process is so confusing and convoluted.
The only reason I even noticed was because Thomas just happened to need a routine procedure done this week. When I checked out how much was left to meet our deductible, I realized that something was off between what my insurance company applied to my deductible and what I had paid for the procedure. This led to many hours trying to decipher invoices and claims and medical codes, hours of my life I’ll never get back, even if I ever get money back. After a heated conversation with the billing department on the phone, they finally agreed that they had innocently overcharged me and would promptly refund me.
The problem is there is nothing innocent about this. In fact, Thomas’s procedure was at another outpatient center under the operation of the same hospital system, which is the only hospital system in this area. Again, we arrive at 5:30 A.M. and a receptionist promptly greets us. Within minutes of sitting down in the waiting room, a billing clerk whisks us away to an office to try to convince us to prepay our portion of the facility fee, which this time they say is $2800. Never did the clerk say that paying upfront is optional, at least until Natalie firmly refused to pay, stating we wouldn’t pay until they ran it through our insurance and billed us. At which point, the clerk told us that was perfectly okay and sent us on our way back to the waiting room, where I watched her reemerge several times to take other arriving patients back to her office, where undoubtedly she tried to extract prepayment. There is no doubt in my mind that this hospital system is systematically overcharging people and pocketing the money of the folks who don’t realize it. How they get away with it is beyond me.
All this is to say, I’m really grateful for all the healthcare professionals who work in the hospitals and doctor offices, even if the system itself is broken. The doctors and nurses all seemed to try their best to provide personal and friendly care, though I’m sure they’re likely under quotas to see more patients and do more procedures, to run more cattle through the cattle chute.
And I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe there isn’t one. Just be aware that if you or your loved ones have a procedure scheduled, you aren’t required to pay upfront, even if they make it seem otherwise.
I suppose there are advantages to living in a desert. For one, allergy season is probably pretty short. Without vegetation carpeting the landscape, the human immune system must have little to overreact to. Here, in the borderlands between the subtropic and temperate climes, my white blood cells are currently waging war against any trace of pollen trying to invade my pores and orifices. My body’s attempt to expel the invaders has mostly expelled lots of bodily fluids through my runny nose, watery eyes, and rapid-fire sneezes.
The only way to escape allergies
Still, I’m trying to find the silver lining in the pollen cloud–maybe there are advantages to having allergies, evolutionary speaking? For one, if I ever get lost in the middle of the night in a hayfield, I’d be more likely to survive since search and rescue would easily locate me because they’ll hear me sneezing from a mile away. Two, bad allergies provide a legitimate excuse for skipping events with in-laws without incurring the full-force of a spouse’s wrath. Yep, even for a trophy husband like me, my wife doesn’t mind if I miss a family function when I’m under the influence of allergies and can’t speak coherently without sneezing and sniffling.
The biggest advantage, however, to allergy season is that sales of our honey go through the roof. I feel a little bit guilty on this count. I’m not sure there is much truth to the theory that local honey actually helps with allergies. Case-in-point, as someone who ingests an inordinate amount of honey from my own farm, my allergies have only minimally improved, progressing from wretched to merely miserable.
That said, I know many good upstanding people who swear that local honey helps their allergies. According to my allergist, I’m mostly allergic to pollen from the grass family, and supposedly bees don’t pollinate grass species because they’re wind pollinated, so maybe I’m not the best case study (that said, I see a lot of bees pollinating my sweet corn, which is definitely a member of the grass family).
Sometimes I wonder how my ancestors from bygone days survived allergies without the use of Allegra and Zyrtec and Benadryl. If I lived back then, the month of May would have eventually taken me out, with my headstone memorializing the exact date in May that I finally lost my battle with hay fever.
Anyway, here’s hoping you survive allergy season this year!
Once in a moment of inspiration, I decided to buy 32 apple trees. Talk about making work for yourself. Now, every winter, the trees need pruning to ensure a bountiful apple harvest for the gluttonous woodland creatures. Between the racoons, opossums, and deer, we probably salvage half a peck of apples for ourselves, enough for Natalie to make a delicious homemade apple crisp each year to remind me of the foolishness of my moment of inspiration.
“This better taste good,” she says, “how much did you spend on those apple trees again?”
I will be glad when the apple orchard turns seven years old; according to the IRS, I can then discard the receipts and all physical evidence of that moment of inspiration. Thereafter, I can plead amnesia when my wife asks me silly questions about costs.
The problem with apple trees is that they grow, which means the chore of pruning becomes substantially more labor and time-consuming each year, yet the actual return on investment usually remains the same–nothing. Some years it’s woodland creatures. Other years it’s late freezes or early springs. Unfortunately, some of our apple trees had already started blooming this year when winter finally decided to return this week. Not a pretty site. What was a beautiful apple tree white with blooms now looks like it decided to paint its petals black in goth attire. Thus, the woodland creatures might have to go on a diet this year.
And the weather is not only rough on blooms but the creatures that pollinate them. I got a call on Tuesday from a local farmer who said he had a big swarm of bees on a post in his shed. “Are you sure they’re honeybees,” I said, “cause it’s too cold for bees to be swarming?” Turns out he wasn’t kidding. Sure enough, there was a big swarm of bees on a post in his shed. Only problem was they swarmed on the Monday before the cold front blew through, then spent all night huddled and shivering on the post as temps got below freezing. By the time he called me on Tuesday, they seemed half dead and the ones that were alive were just barely moving.
Sometimes with cold bees, dead is “not quite dead yet.” They may look dead, but if you can get them back in a warm area they will miraculously buzz back to life. I brushed the bees off the post into a closed-up nuc box, took them home and put the box over a vent in our dining room. The next morning, I was eating breakfast with the sound of bees roaring. They were up and at ‘em early, ready to escape their nuc box and forage because it was 72 degrees in our house. Because the weather was calling for another night of below freezing temps, I kept them inside on Wednesday night and then put them in the bee yard today since it has warmed back up. I put a frame of eggs in there just in case the queen wasn’t among one of the resurrected bees.
So far, they seem to be flying and doing good–just no thanks to the weather!
