“Cherish (verb): 1. Protect and care for lovingly; 2. Hold something dear; 3. Keep a hope or ambition in one’s mind.”—Oxford English Dictionary

Greetings Dear Ones!!

Yesterday, I managed to hack and slash my way into the blueberry cathedral and harvest a quart of the tartest, sharpest berries ever to dance on a tongue in purple stilettos. As I savored the repeated contraction in my salivary glands, I gazed around me, upon the wheat field… the peach orchard… Pickett’s last fence… and decided that this place is like the Battle of Gettysburg all over again. It’s going to take a bayonet charge to turn the tide of this chaos. Col. Joshua Chamberlain, where are you now??? The peach trees look a little bombed out already. Many of them are completely dead. I lie down next to the mower, which I have been dragging backwards through the grass because that is the only way I can move it, and dream of bees. These trees need bees. I’m SO looking forward to keeping bees again in the coming Spring.

Keeping bees with my children and attending “bee school” with them at the local community college, was one of the highlights of our homeschooling experience. My son thought nothing of putting his bare hands into a gently humming miracle of golden, honey-scented, Happenings as we pulled out frames to study our colonies. We saw new bees chewing their way through the wax caps of their cells; we saw the queen being fed and groomed; we saw endless running about and hurrying in the honey factory. It was magical.

Once, we had a colony go rogue and become nasty. Apparently, they were going through queens like Henry the VIII. Angry sentries would fly out and sting anyone who came near the entrance of their hive—they especially targeted unfortunate husbands who did not feel the same way about beekeeping as we did. When he had been run off his own property more than seven times and had ruined a variety of cell-phones in the process of abruptly consigning himself to the nearest swimming pool to escape, I was given an ultimatum. Something needed to be done or the hive had to be destroyed. I called a local Stinging Insect Guru. (Hey, Kids! There’s a job you might not hear about at the college employment fairs!)

This guru listened to my story and told me exactly what to do. There was just one problem. I didn’t want to do it. I was now terrified of this hive. I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. I confessed this to him and, I am ashamed to admit, I even asked if I could just pay him to take care of this for me? That’s when he hit the roof and began to speak to me in a manner that sounded (to me) a lot like yelling, though he later insisted he never yells. “People like you make me crazy,” he said with way more force than necessary, “I don’t mind getting calls from people who need help, little old ladies and people who have infestations they never asked for but YOU are responsible for this and you’re just scared and that is NOT the same thing at all!!! I have no respect for you. Put your big girl pants on right now and ask yourself if you are a bee KEEPER or a bee have-er. Then suit up, get out there, and DO WHAT MUST BE DONE.”

I hung up and cried. His fury startled me. He was AWFUL. He was RUDE. He was MEAN… but worst of all, he was RIGHT. So I had a big, snotty, sorry-for-myself sob session, then I put my big girl pants on and went out and did what needed to be done. I waited until the more aggressive field bees had left for the day, then I blew more smoke into those hives than a freshman dorm sees after Parent’s Weekend, draped damp towels full of sugar water over the boxes as I dismantled the hive, then put the boxes of brood onto my other hives with layers of newspaper in between the boxes. By the time the bees chewed through the paper to get to the foreign bees, whom they intended to fight, they had already acquired the scent of the new queen and calmed down. All the colonies thrived after that. With healthy queens in place, Peace was restored to the kingdoms.

The Stinging Guru was right; that bastard was a fantastic teacher and I am grateful for the lesson to this day. There IS a difference between merely “having” something, in name only, and cherishing it to the point that one is willing to do hard things in its service.

I think about this with regard to my new customers. I don’t want to “have” customers—I want to “keep” them. Cherish them. I have decided to enroll everyone I encounter in my own private Cherishing School—so that after they graduate from having their clothes hemmed or mended, they will leave feeling seen, heard, cared for, and helped in whatever way is best for them, to the best of my ability. Prudence is excited about Cherishing School. She wants to be the new Head Mistress and give everyone punishments to write. She is ready to Scold. I tell her that yelling really only works on the Desperate, Honest, or truly Courageous—those able to face the truth of their consequences honorably, which is pretty much only down and out addicts and housewives with rogue bee colonies chasing their husbands into swimming pools—people at rock bottom. For everyone else, it’s going to have to be something more subtly persuasive—like true Gentility.

A customer comments to me that the current political climate is getting so fraught “I can’t stand up for my own beliefs without being made to feel stupid by the opposition. Anything I say gets an argument.”

“And do you listen to their arguments?” I ask.

“Hell no,” she says dismissively. “They are NUTS. Why would I do that? But I’m sick of the yelling so I just shut up.”

“Instead of listening?”

“Yes.”

Hmm…. What I notice from my little corner of the workshop is that in every interaction with our fellow beings on this planet, we are showing each other in our behavior, attitude, and expectations what we have previously learned about Kindness. We reveal how we have been treated by how we expect to be treated. Most of us don’t expect to be cherished. It’s time we teach each other that lesson. So, how do we begin? Well, how do children learn to speak a language? By being spoken to in that language. They learn music because their parents sing to them and dance with them. They learn kindness because others have displayed kindness to them in ways that are meaningful to them.

This week, I had another fun customer. He wore a mask, but that’s as far as he went in obeying my protocols. I could not keep him in the dressing room. It was like trying to keep weasels in a milk crate. He kept slipping past me, insisting he did not need to try anything on, as most of the stuff was his wife’s. Instead, he pushed his way through to the work table and spread out all his garments so he could show me how to do my job. I don’t want to tell you too many details about him because I don’t want you to judge him… (Oops, now I’ve judged YOU. Sorry!) But let’s just say he was from a nearby city and state rather known for “pushiness,” not to mention blatant support of the WRONG baseball team. (Bless their hearts!) He wanted everything done yesterday but “by five p.m.” was a reasonable compromise. He and his wife were going on vacation the next day and needed the stuff immediately if possible—or two weeks after they returned and had re-quarantined themselves. Then he asked if I could meet him at the local food co-op to save him a return trip to my shop and up all those stairs. He had other errands to run.

I could not stop laughing. He was so fantastic—like a character out of a storybook who is sent to test the wizard. Granted, I had enjoyed our exchange about as much as discovering I had finally smacked a pesky mosquito only to realize it had fallen into my own water glass… Still, after I got done sterilizing every surface of my shop and washing my hands, what impressed me most was his Innocence. His inner radio channel was set to a fairly primitive dial and that was all he could hear, but that was not his fault. Nothing had ever happened to wake him up or make him understand he could change his dial. Yelling would never do it—he was too used to yelling. He tuned it out. I decided that if ever there was a candidate for Cherishing School, it’s him. Clearly, he is the way he is because he has a Cherish Deficit. The easiest people to cherish are usually cherished by lots of people and therefore are not as closed off and brusquely defensive as this guy. (Of course, the Easiest of All are those who have learned to truly cherish themselves…but that goes without saying.)

I met him five hours later at the co-op with everything neatly done, on hangers, in a bag, with complimentary face masks holding the hangers together at the top. He stared. His eyes welled a little. “You people in Vermont are so nice. Sometimes I can’t believe it,” he said, “I love it here.” He paused and surveyed the heat waves rising in the parking lot with far-away eyes. “It’s different.”

I melted too. It certainly is.

It’s a privilege to be kind. I’m lucky to be the amused/bemused witness of how people respond to kindness. I try not to dwell on the implicit sadness around the fact that there exist people who are shocked by generosity, good will, attentive service. Some of you reading this might actually be judging me for being too sweet to a customer who will now expect big things of me all the time—I might be creating a rod for my own back by spoiling people. I don’t care. We need more kindness in this world. Especially when it is unexpected, lavish, and surprising. And anyway, I’m NOT that sweet. I’m actually a slightly rotten person, doing nice things just to see what happens next and getting caught in my own experiments. I’m curious. Are you?

Welcome to Cherishing School, My Darlings! It’s a new research facility dedicated to exploring what happens when we suppress the urge to give each other the finger and instead give each other a hand.

May the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy