If You Abuse it, You Lose it. - Four

Four

The cellar was cool and dusty. There was only a couple of shelves down there with five jars of green beans, two of corn, and a half dozen of some kind of stew or soup; they all looked good, none of the seals were broke. She noticed a couple of bins off to the side and looked inside. There was sawdust in them and she carefully used the axe handle to stir it up and see if there was anything in there. One bin had two dozen potatoes and the other bin had a good number of carrots in it. Looking around, she found a burlap sack hanging on a hook and loaded the potatoes and carrots in it. Tucked into a corner, hanging on a nail, was one of those onion bags with some onions in it that had started to sprout and a woven strand of garlic that was a bit shriveled but there was no mold or sour smell to it. Those went into the bag also.

There was a box on one of the lower shelves that was pushed back, so she pulled it out to see what was in it. It was full of newspaper wrapped apples! Red and Yellow Delicious with a few Granny Smiths! Cool! While they were not the freshest, she didn’t see any mold or bugs on them so she loaded them into the bag also. She was glad she had decided to travel light that day. Her backpack was almost empty, just a first aid kit, some jerky, a lighter and her larger enamel cup that she could heat water in. Of course she did have a water bottle on her too. Her sling hung on a loop that was on her ‘baby bob’ fanny pack and she carried her bow.

If she carried the bag and put the jars in her backpack, she would have to sling her bow over her shoulder so she would have at least one hand free. She was wishing for one of her Granny’s big shoulder bags that she could have slung over one shoulder and shove to the back, but she had left the only one she had back at the cave. And the burlap bag didn’t have any kind of handle at all. She decided to see just how much she would be able to carry and took off her backpack and began to load the jars. With a lot of patience, she was able to fit all the jars half the apples, the onions and garlic in the backpack. Her ‘baby bob’ was loaded with apples as well. She looked all over the cellar and the garage but didn’t find any rope or bags with handles for the rest of the food, so she resigned herself to carrying the now half full bag. She would just have to be extra alert. There was two empty jars that she had also taken in case she was able to find that bee hive and if there was beeswax in that old tree. Finally having everything together and ready to go, she set off again for home by way of the bee hive.

“Lookie here Coon, see those bees?” Poppy asked me.

“Yeah, I sure do…they look like they are attacking that ole tree. What are they doing?”

“Let’s go look and see. But we will have to be very careful not to upset them because if they get mad, we will get stung!”

Very carefully Poppy and I managed to sneak to the tree and look inside a hole that the bees were busy coming and going from. Inside, we could just make out honey combs full of rich honey.

I watched Poppy as he slowly took his big knife and reaching inside, cut off a nice size chunk of the honey filled comb and just as slowly pulled it out and whispered for me to open that large zip lock bag we had brought in my ‘baby bob’. We were both grinning as we made our way out of the bee’s territory and headed for home. Neither of us had been stung! AND we would be having honey on our breakfast biscuits tomorrow!