There is always an untold story! Next time you visit your loved one, look for a story you have never heard.
My dad in his beekeeping garb, in a painting by my sister Cindy Scott Strickland.
My dad – a former minister and caregiver – loves other people’s stories because they give us a way to connect. (You can read more about my dad – and hear him sing – at this post.)
On my latest visit to see my parents, I heard a story from Mom and Dad I hadn’t heard before – about how Dad came by his very first hive of honey bees.
My dad kept honey bees as a hobby for over forty years, and even helped put me and my sisters though college with the profits. At the peak, he had over a hundred bee colonies in orange groves and palmetto fields, and a tractor-trailer periodically appeared in our suburban backyard to retrieve 55-gallon drums of the sweet stuff from the “honey-house.” I remember dad showing me how to uncap the wax of the combs, load the frames into the spinning extractor, and watch the warm honey flow into the jars labeled:” Three Queen Honey” (after me and my queenly sisters.)
Harry Scott showing my sister, Karen Scott Lewis, one of the bees from his beehive.
But I’d never heard the story about how dad came to own that very first hive, and how mom shared her life – and her personal space – with those bees from the very beginning of their marriage.
“A man in our church at Duke gave it to him” mom remembers. Dad was in divinity school at Duke University and mom was doing graduate work Christian education there, and as part of their studies they served in a local church.
“We had bought a trailer to live in, and some people in the church let us park it on their property. The field across the street was cultivated, and Harry (my dad) decided to plant turnips. He bought a pound of turnip seeds, and turnip seeds are tiny, so he planted a whole crop of turnips!”
My parents at home in Florida
The turnips didn’t really grow, but the enterprise gave dad a reputation as a guy who “likes that farming stuff.” So when a beekeeping man in the local church died, his son turned to the 23-year-old student pastor who had apparently just fallen off the turnip truck. Dad took over the bee hive, mom became a lifetime bee widow on weekends, and although I myself was yet to be born (or as my parents would say I was still “in the mind of God”), my college tuition was assured.
That was in North Carolina. When dad was stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where my older sister would be born, the military moved the new Air Force Chaplain’s trailer to the base but bee hive hauling was not in the contract. So dad put a screen over the opening to the bee hive and put the whole hive in the back seat of the car, mom took the passenger seat, and they were off!
Every once in while, Dad says, a bee would get loose and start buzzing around the car. Mom would say “Harry…..”
For more about my parents, see:
- Digging Ditches with Dad – the Art of the Family Visit
- Joy with Our Mothers Now
- The Art of Making a Personal Connection – Plus My Own Dad Singing!
If you would like to help your loved one create a memoir, contact Shirley Paul about LifeLines.
For more inspiring stories, see Hearts at Work.
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