In the Context of Community

even going with the flow is dangerous at times

At the get-together before the get-together, we sit in the little back garden, drinking wine. In my case, a non-alcoholic juniper brew. The host passes around fly swatters, because a few wasps are hovering—mistaking us for flowers. Or for something that harbors aphids, more likely.

I shake my head slightly to pass on the offer. And I watch the wasp near me land on the lip of my glass. At first, I’m relieved. No one is going to swat it when it is so close to me. If I knew any of these people, I would shower them with wasp facts and hope they’d let this one go. Let all of them go, since they’re not being aggressive. Not likely to sting.

But I don’t know anyone here except my husband, and I figure that I’ll do better socially by hiding my pedantic side for a while.

The wasp starts exploring the sides of the glass, crawling all the way down to the sticky juniper drink. It seems like such a stupid thing for her to do. And I’d swear I’m seeing the fluid actually reach up to grab her little legs. I watch her antennae unfurl as she slips in.

I remind myself not to project feelings like panic onto insects. She swims. Coldly, objectively, I can say I am watching a creature who was not designed to swim, try to swim. I look over at my husband, who—fortunately—is not cold and objective, and understands my feelings. He suggests I pour the drink into a nearby plant bed. But I am pretty sure our hostess, with the freakishly green thumb, would not appreciate that. He then suggests I fish her out with a pretzel stick. I wonder if it is already too late, if she’d be left to passively die on the edge of a piece of plastic patio furniture.

Is it better to die fighting? Is the struggle itself a distraction?

I can’t not project.

I start to lower a pretzel stick into the glass, but that brings everyone’s attention to my wasp. “Oh, leave it there! It will call to all its wasp friends for help.”

A simple wasp trap.

The host brings me another glass of juniper brew. In the old glass, which he left on the table, I watch the wasp swim frantically. I realise it probably won’t drown but die of exhaustion. I feel sick.

Now I do want to kill it. This is taking too long.

This is one of those get-togethers where the room consciously splits along a gender line, and I’m called to the women’s table at the far end of the garden. I leave my wasp behind. I try to remember the last time I was at this kind of gathering. In my childhood, when the men and women were separated, there were chores involved. Not here. The host comes over to top off my glass.

There was a lot of laughter, and a lot of kind words that evening. Everyone behaving in the way we are taught to behave so that a little community runs smoothly. Gendered topics: babies, grandbabies, funerals. Compliments. Tentative questions. Shared resources and shared information about resources: Who cut your hair? I felt simultaneously out of place, and in place. My mind, though, still occasionally wandered toward wasps. How generations of queens, apparently having adapted enough to swim, still can’t get out of a wine glass.

There are things we didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about wasps the rest of the evening. And no one mentioned the two local teenagers that drowned in a rip tide the previous weekend. That was too awful. Is too awful. And honestly, when I say to myself “it happens” it isn’t an attempt to diminish the pain.

On the contrary.

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My apologies for the lack of a Wednesday poem this week. I have new medications and am learning to negotiate the side effects. However, I will be back later this week with an audio poem. And again on Sunday with another Process Journal Entry.

Until then, have a great week!

Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.