Expanding Vista

There’s been an Airstream trailer outside our back door for the past three months. The landlord’s son who keeps bees has needed a lot of extra help getting new hives built, honey extracted, and bees trucked around the valley (it’s going to be a big year in the bee business, especially for someone who sprayed his bees against mites nobody else believed would be a problem).

The trailer is owned by one Charlie, a laid-back jovial guy who seems curious about everything. He’s not the one who’s been living in it, though: that’s his stepson Taylor, a third-year engineering student who’s been doing the bee work to save up enough money to finish school back in Albuquerque.

Taylor would emerge with a cigarette at roughly the time we were walking the cats on leashes outside. Convention dictates a conversation is required. Nobody really wanted this so early in the morning; normally I still had to get in the shower and eat breakfast.

Charlie picked up the trailer yesterday; Taylor’s gone to Nevada for the next phase of bee work. And our mornings will once again focus exclusively on making sure the cats don’t catch pocket gophers, on the black-crowned night-herons, on the possibly nesting Bullock’s oriole.