Gallows humor #1 - what's in the freezer?

Gallows humor #1. [posted on FB 7/20]

I may coordinate a memorial service for children killed by abortion 25 years ago.  I’m trying to dump the job, and could succeed; but for now, I’m a memorializer.  So I’m gonna memorialize.  Some of my dear friends will probably want to skip these entries.  I will mark them “Gallows humor,” and then you won’t expect a funny story about my grandchildren.

I was thinking about the job when I pulled a wasps’ nest out of a tree this morning.  I found the nest when I was mowing, and they attacked me.  One did,anyway; I thought he hit me in the ear with a hammer.  Maybe that was just me slapping him.  Or her.  But I assure you that when I slapped it I was after a male figure with a weapon.  I shut off the mower blade and tried to escape driving off, going faster and faster by sliding around in the driver’s seat and hollering.  I came in the house demanding baking soda, and my son David got the stuff right away – but did not even pretend not to laugh at me.  Anyway, I went back this morning, sprayed them twice, then cut the branch with the nest, and brought the gray paper football back to the house. 

Two years ago, I played with wasps’ nest paper.  The paper was attractive, with lines of orange and white amidst the dominant gray.  It doesn’t have any lateral strength; when I tried to write on it, the pen ripped it.  So I wrote in a pointillist style.  In about 2,000 little red dots, I wrote:

The trouble with bees

Is not in front

Their mouths may smile

Their bottoms don’t.

Then I framed it, and left it in the family summer house in Peterborough.  I thought it was wonderful, and so did one cousin.  Everyone else wanted the paper and poem to go away.

Now I have some more wasp paper, but I didn’t have time to think it through this morning.  So I just bagged the whole nest tight and tossed it in the freezer, on top of 40 pounds of blueberries.  Later.

Betsy doesn’t really want the nest there, but she has dealt cheerfully with worse.  25 years ago, when I was taking little bodies out of dumpsters – sometimes just a few in a grisly night’s work, sometimes 20 or so – it took me a while to work out an appropriate way to deal with them.  In the interim, I froze the poor naked little bastards.

“John,” Betsy says, “let’s have chicken for dinner.  I think we have some in the freezer.  I’ll check.”

“NO!  NO!  I’ll get it!  Stay right there!”

Eventually I got caught and had to explain why we had bodies in the freezer.  So before we hit 75, I worked out some other options.

Wasps on the blueberries?  No big deal.

Memorial Services nationwide September 14, 2013.  Local service, in Fairfax, will not be lugubrious.  Details TBA.  In fact, details TBD.