Reading Our Region

Essays from a Regional Writer

Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.

Sample these selected writings:

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I Know Where the Bees Went

by Susan Charkes

Last night I dreamed of them, dreamed of pillowing my head on their soft quilted white blossoms, dreamed of their scent curling around me as into its arms, drawing me up, up, up. till I didn’t want to come back down.

I awoke in a fever, driven with yearning, driven to find the flowers of the honey locust.

Green leaves line the streets. Green leaves rim the fields. Green leaves crowd the banks.

Where are the locust trees? Where are the waterfalls of white froth cascading down over the canopy, the oval leaflets peering out like eyes through a veil? Where oh where are my locusts? There’s one! – It’s out of reach. Should I risk falling? Another! On someone’s property. Should I risk arrest? There! Too close to traffic. Should I risk death?

One here. One there. Why not whole groves of them? Native though they are, farmers in this area used to plant locust trees. The old ones knew that the bees would find the trees. And where there are bees, there is the land of milk and honey …and locust honey is the most exquisite honey of all, the fruit of dazzling desire.

Where are the bees? They say the honeybees have left their hives, and won’t come back. They’ve disappeared. All kinds of theories abound. Maybe something is killing them off. A new virus, a new fungus. Pesticides, perhaps. Or cell phones. Maybe something is affecting their homing instincts.

There! A grove, a fencerow, a thick stand of black locusts, just where they ought to be, across route 202 from the hospital. Here they are, ready to give sweet therapy, cure the ills of all, nurse the sick back to health and transport the healthy to earthly paradise.

The flowers hang in clusters, like grapes. The fragrance is sweet and hopelessly, helplessly perfumed of everything that anyone could ever have wanted. I breathe it in and can’t stop inhaling.

Bees above and bees below, parting the petals. As with other members of the pea family, locust flowers are arranged like little bonnets, with two half-round petals behind and two crescents protruding perpendicularly from the middle, protecting a horn-shaped fifth petal that is the object of the bee’s devotion.

The aroma of heavy, honeyed ease envelopes me. I swoon, covered in blossoms. This is the stuff that dreams are made of. I awake, in the middle of the night, surrounded by flowers. They still exude their honeyed scent in the dark. The leaves have gone to sleep: exhausted, they fold into themselves. But the flowers can’t help it; they keep perfuming the night air, as if the bees might still come to them. Or as if the bees were not the point at all. As if the point were the perfume itself, the heady, addicting, overwhelming expression of the sweetness of life -- and the bees merely hopelessly, helplessly intoxicated by its power.

Where are the bees? Gone to flowers, every one. Looking, looking, looking for the locust.

I will follow them.