It’s a jungle out there. “There” being our Noyac backyard.
Over the weekend, as my better half set about weeding the brick patio we not so carefully laid in loose sand a few years ago, she was “lit up,” as I keep saying, by a cloud of vengeful yellow jackets on a defensive mission out of a hole in the ground, giving their lives so the collective could live on. (In theory. It’s almost enough to make me regret the can of Raid I later bought at True Value.)
It was the morning, and as I’m one of those who rouse from slumber slowly, painfully, as if getting up off the canvas after five rounds with Marvin Hagler, from the back bedroom I heard what sounded like a murder. With a kitchen knife. One stung. Then another. There was one in her shirt. Then two. Up a pant leg. Another about her person generally. At least a half-dozen of them dishing out the punishment. The attack moved into the house and seemed to last for several minutes.
Daughter #2 tended to the patient while yours truly swung the fly swatter at the stragglers.
It’s a problem here, these nests, in our largely ignored yet healthy and verdant lawn. I mow it as seldom as possible, but still have found myself similarly lit up on occasion, once in the face, with subsequent, readily mocked swelling.
This reminded me of high school in Bridgehampton, when our earth science teacher, a self-styled drill sergeant named Mr. Kaufman, came to class with bee-stung jowls that rendered him, to our delight, Nixonian in appearance.
His far more likable counterpart down the hall, Al Trages, happened to be blessed with natural, God-given jowls. He was an actual veteran, too, often sporting his Army jacket buttoned tight across his considerable midriff.
East Hamptoners of some tenure will remember him from Cricket Caterers and the Crystal Room on Pantigo Road, with the sign advertising clam pies nailed to a tree out front. I remember him as maybe the only person who ever held me to account, reading me the riot act for scoring a 75 on my chemistry Regents.
He was right. I could’ve tried harder. Then again, even the supposed lesson-be-learned F previously leveled by Mr. Kaufman, as red and prominent on my transcript as a hornet sting on flesh, didn’t stop me from getting into Boston U.
Read it and weep, kids. That’s the way it was in 1985.