Chapter 7 #2
The warehouse, where we’d had the course, was nothing like the house or the shed.
It was new, clean, and industrial, with whitewashed walls and a polished floor that looked like you could eat off it if you were so inclined.
There were nearly a dozen huge fermentation tanks, stacked IBC totes filled to varying levels with honey, and rows of massive bottles lined up along one wall, each labelled in neat, tiny handwriting.
I’d seen it all before, of course, but it was still so beautiful to me.
“Welcome to the meadery,” said Teddy, her voice echoing off the high ceiling. “And, yes, before you say it, I know you’ve been here before.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, not giving her the satisfaction.
She grunted. “It’s a nightmare to clean.”
She started to run me through the basics – how the honey was harvested, the fermentation tanks, the filtering, the bottling – but I did then remind her that I’d been on the course and asked if she could show me how to use the hydrometer instead.
It was on my shot list; based on my research, people knew pretty intuitively that it was used in beverage production, so I figured it should stop the scroll for our target audience.
She looked somewhat surprised as I explained this to her, but she nodded anyway.
She extracted a sample from one of the fermenting batches and used the hydrometer to measure the specific gravity. I filmed the process, glad that she was too focused to care about the camera.
She held up the result, and I took a still. “That’s a lot of sugar,” I said, pointing at the measurement.
“Yeah, we don’t mess around.” She set the tool down and folded her arms. “You know what that means?”
“It means it’ll be sweeter rather than dry?” Remembering Jen’s lecture, I added: “And it’ll ferment more slowly, unless it gets diluted.”
She stared, eyes wide, and I thought for a second that I’d actually broken her. Then she let out a low, grudging laugh. “You did your homework.”
I glowed a little, even as I tried to play it cool. “I pay attention. I am actually interested in all this, you know. I didn’t just take the job for the aesthetics, despite what you seem to think.”
She watched me for a long moment, like she was trying to decide whether to believe me or not. I willed her to give in; this summer would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to jump through hoops to keep her happy.
Suddenly, she put the sample and the hydrometer down and strode out of the warehouse. I struggled yet again to keep up, running after her, abandoning my bag this time.
“Good. Because today, you’re on weed whacker duty.”
I blinked. “Is that a euphemism?”
She turned at the entrance to the barn and gave me a sad, pitying look.
“No, it’s a chore. I think you call it a strimmer?
Probably the least aesthetic farm job possible.
” She reached her hand in through the door and pulled out a …
well, a strimmer. I hadn’t known what it was called until now, but I’d seen people use them, of course.
Mostly in those videos online of people clearing unruly lawns in America for free.
She shoved the apparatus towards me, and I took it, the heft of it surprising me as she released it. I’d been joking earlier about being hazed – had she taken it as a personal challenge?
“The back paths are overgrown,” Teddy said, pointing back behind her towards the flower garden, “and I almost tripped on my way to check the hives this morning. You’ll find gloves in the bin if you want them.
Ear and eye protection is by the door. Batteries should be on the charger next to Maggie’s desk. ”
I peered inside the barn, and indeed, there was a battery pack plugged into the wall.
“Where do I start?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was already in over my head.
“Just work on the garden paths for now,” she said.
“I doubt you’ll get much more than that done today; not with the brambles that are spilling out.
” Then she pushed past me and vanished around the corner of the barn as quickly as we’d come.
I stood there, the strimmer threatening to topple out of my arms, as a raindrop plopped onto the bridge of my nose.
* * *
Unfortunately, the “weed whacker” was even harder to use than I’d feared.
I’d imagined it as a sort of outdoor hoover – a little whine, a little dust and debris, maybe the occasional pebble ricocheting off your shin – but instead, the moment I thumbed the switch, the whole thing shuddered like it was possessed, and I nearly took my foot off on the first go.
For the first ten minutes, I was spectacularly bad at it.
The cord snagged on every rock and tangled itself in the very weeds I was trying to whack, and within sixty seconds, I’d managed to pepper the lower half of my legs with a fine mist of sheep dung and pulverised nettle that the rain turned immediately to mud.
But I was dressed far more sensibly today in a pair of dungarees – also borrowed off Morgan – and after a while, I started to get into a rhythm, moving my phone around on the tripod as needed to capture a time lapse. Everything was content, right?
It was mindless work – the kind that left enough space in your head for thinking.
As I strimmed my way up the main path in the rain, I let my brain chew on the real project: the event.
The festival. The thing I’d been hired to help make possible, and the thing Jen had staked her grant – and maybe the whole next year for the farm – on getting right.
She’d said the council wanted something that was simultaneously a celebration of local culture and attractive to people from the wider area.
I’d pitched half a dozen smaller concepts to Jen, some of them straight off my Pinterest mood board (flower crown workshops, wood-fired pizza nights, a “Wellness Weekend”), but the one that had lit Jen up was the big one.
We wanted to combine the essences of a food festival and an arts festival: local produce, live music, a gallery, guest makers and artisans, arts and crafts for the kids …
something that celebrated the honey and the mead as well as the local community.
As soon as I’d pitched it, we’d both known that it was the right choice.
It was also the hardest one, so I had my work cut out for me this summer.
Now, as I carved out the paths through the flower garden, I let myself imagine it: bunting strung up between the buildings, kids chasing each other with painted faces, Jen’s art hung up with others from local artists for a silent auction, and a pop-up bar where the mead flowed freely, all set to the soundtrack of live local folk music, playing from a small stage in the space between the house and the barn.
I wanted it to be more than just cute and aesthetic, no matter what Teddy thought.
I wanted it to feel, even for a day, like a little pocket of the world where everybody felt at home.
Like they were exactly where they were supposed to be.
Where everything tasted and smelled like it belonged to the moment.
The way I’d felt when I first came to Gwenynen, and the way I still felt now, despite Teddy’s best attempts to scare me off.
As I zig-zagged through the garden, I added to the running list in my head of people to contact about partnering together – local bakeries, farm shops, the pottery studio in the next town over, maybe the woodworker who made the nice benches at the bus stop in town …
we could all work together to put on the best damn festival this town had ever seen, or something cheesy like that.
Something of the community and for the community, but that could be shared widely, too.
Hell, if I did it right, maybe the whole thing would become an annual tradition.
And if it worked – really worked, not just as a fun day, but as a means to grow the farm, too – maybe I could get the job permanently.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to go back to flitting through life like Teddy had said.
It was early days, but, weed-whacking aside, I was already more excited about my work than I had ever been in my life, and that was with having to work alongside my nemesis.
Who knew – maybe, if things went well enough, we could both get what we wanted. Whatever that was in Teddy’s case.
The strimmer died suddenly with a mechanical whine, just as I’d tamed the last stretch of bramble.
I stood there, winded, looking over the surprisingly clean lines I’d carved out along the paths.
My hands were vibrating with that weird post-power tool numbness that made it feel like I’d borrowed someone else’s body for the day.
I dumped the gear back in the barn and plugged the battery back in, rinsed my face at the hosepipe now that the rain had stopped, and made a slow victory lap to find Teddy and show off my handiwork.
I caught a glimpse of movement up ahead – the flash of white mesh against the grey sky; the top of Teddy’s head in her bee veil as she knelt near the apiary.
I came up behind her, careful not to crunch any gravel as I did.
She was crouched low, elbows on her knees, hands cupped and still.
I could see a little dark blur moving in her palm – a bee, I assumed, but it wasn’t moving right; I could tell that even from here.
I got as close as I dared, just a few feet behind her, then took out my phone and zoomed in with my phone’s camera to get a better look.
One of the bee’s wings was bent at a bad angle, and it sort of shuddered in place, legs splaying like it had forgotten how to stand.
Teddy was talking to it. Not in a weird baby-talk voice, but calm and low, like she was convincing a child to breathe through a panic attack.
“It’s okay,” she was saying. “It’s just the rain. You’ll get there. That’s it.”
After a minute, Teddy looked up and saw me.
“What’s wrong with the little guy?” I asked quietly.