honey and memory
I haven't had much to do in recent weekends, and it's made me once again mull at length about the difference between experience and memory. On uneventful weekends like this it feels like time crawls by as slowly as it can. Then Monday morning comes around as it always does and I'm left wondering how the weekend slipped through my fingers in the blink of an eye. Because of this paradox, I've been trying to lean into my boredom more. Would the weekend feel longer if I sat on my porch and meditated for the entire time? It'd certainly seem like an eternity in the moment. But without any memorable events to mark the time, would I remember it as a long weekend? (I suspect not.)
I visited a farmer's market on Saturday morning. While the sad vegetables and overpriced pastries didn't impress me, I did linger at the two stands selling local honey chatting with the vendors. As my friend pointed out, I'm a lot more interested in honey than even I realized. When I lived in Chile one of my roommates was the daughter of beekeepers. Inexplicably, she didn't like honey, so I was given free reign of all the jars of solid, raw honey from her family farm. I remember savoring the grainy texture of the crystallized honey straight from the spoon every morning and being amazed at how much better it tasted than the store-bought stuff I grew up on.
I wanted to buy some jars of local honey to bring to the friends I'm visiting this week, but I couldn't find any small enough worth bringing in my suitcase. Local honey strikes me as the perfect gift: it's unique (each local honey has a unique flavor, texture, and color based on the kinds of flowers in the area), consumable (so it won't take up much space), healthy, and practically nonperishable. And most bee companies carry products beyond the typical spread of flavored/infused honey, including candles, lotions, and soaps. What's not to love?
After I got home from the farmers market I got a little carried away with the whole honey thing and spent hours watching beekeeping Youtube and looking up apiary tours in my area. I really want to see the whole honey-making process now, except there's one small problem—bees kind of scare me. I don't know how I'd manage thousands of them flying around my head even with safety gear, but fortunately the images I've sketched up in my head about how this will go are probably sufficiently divorced from reality to not stop me until it's too late.
As I alluded to earlier, I'm traveling this week! I'm praying the abbreviated week feels even shorter than it is, since I'm spending two half-days on a plane. I'm visiting two new cities, which is something I haven't done in a while (I usually stick to the major cities my friends are in), and I'm excited! Hopefully I'll come back with plenty of blog fodder, and even if not, the time off should do me some good.
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