Honey at the Table

Mary Oliver's poem about honey at the table comforts me as I am mourning my lost hive from yesterday:

Honey At the Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - a taste 
composed of everything lost, in which everything
lost is found.

(from American Primitive by Mary Oliver)

Today, August 5, is the birthday for two of my daughters, Sarah and Becky, born two years apart on the same day.  We'll have dinner tonight to celebrate Sarah who lives in Atlanta and there will be honey at the table.

I'm making profiteroles with honey lavender ice cream as a "birthday cake" for Sarah tonight and the honey will, of course, come from our bees.:

Becky, my other daughter whose birthday is today, lives in Cumberland, Maryland, or I would have her over for dinner as well.