Buzz Off - By Hannah Reed Page 0,1

eyes could see. The store’s special sales and free-flowing champagne weren’t just about my divorce. September was National Honey Month and this was our kick-off event. I lifted my head high and gazed at one of the stained-glass windows above me. The panes twinkled with sunlight, beaming rainbow-colored rays that gave the interior a certain magical light.

Two years ago, in more promising times, Clay and I had bought the Lutheran church for a song when the congregation outgrew the building and put it up for sale. The opportunity came about a year after we’d gotten married. What better way to begin our new lives together than to leave the city life in Milwaukee, move to my hometown of Moraine, buy the house I grew up in from my mother, and convert an early-twentieth-century church into a grocery store?

Our marriage had been doomed from the very beginning, but The Wild Clover was a success. Once we owned the building, I had removed the pews and the raised altar and converted the space into shelves, coolers, and freezers, but leaving all those fabulous stained-glass windows, three on each side, two in the back, and one above the massive double doors in front. From that beginning the store was born.

In addition to our house, we’d also purchased the house next door, which Clay had turned into a custom jewelry shop. Wire jewelry to be specific. Handcrafted, unique pieces guaranteed to attract a flock of females. The Wild Clover had been a beginning. The jewelry shop was the end.

I came back to the present and had to blink several times before the store came back into focus, with all its artfully displayed produce and products and its fresh smells. A group of kids were crowded into the corner, picking out saltwater taffy and other treats from old-fashioned barrels. Several customers were planted right next to the champagne table and looked as if they were there for the duration of the party, or at least until the champagne ran out.

“I need a bagger,” Carrie Ann called to me, and I quickly stepped over to help.

“Try the honey candy,” I pointed out to those in line, indicating a honey jar filled with hard candy. “They have soft centers. Try one. They’re free.”

Honey! Sweet nectar from heaven. Most people don’t know that honey comes in different flavors, depending on the bees’ plant sources. Most honey is a blend, but if honeybees have an opportunity to forage in fields with only one type of available nectar, their honey reflects that.

In Wisconsin we have (listed from lightest to darkest):• Alfalfa

• Clover

• Sunflower

• Cranberry Blossom

• Wildflower

• Buckwheat

• Blueberry Blossom

“Help yourselves,” I encouraged my customers again, taking a piece of honey candy myself, unwrapping it, and popping it in my mouth.

I saw Manny Chapman’s wife, Grace, walk in the front door, which reminded me that I’d promised to help Manny clean up his equipment later today, now that honey-harvesting and -processing season was over.

I’d been intrigued by honeybees as long as I could remember, so last spring when Manny Chapman taught a beginning course in beekeeping, I’d signed right up. Before long, my fascination had become a passion. When the class ended, I hung around to keep absorbing knowledge.

All of last year I helped Manny in his beeyard, extracting and bottling honey, learning every single thing I could from him about beekeeping. This spring, Manny gave me two strong hives of my own as payment for helping him out.

In fact, we worked so well as a team, he’d started talking about a partnership down the line, expanding the honey business with more aggressive marketing and higher honey yields. At last count, Manny had eighty-one hives, each one producing approximately one hundred and fifty pounds of honey, depending on the year. If he wanted to expand his business, he needed help. And I was right there, ready to go.

On a regular Friday afternoon, before the twins went back to college, I used to spend several hours in Manny’s honey house, that sweet-smelling, homey building behind his home where he taught me how to extract wildflower honey and bottle it for sale.

Today wasn’t a regular Friday, though.

“No, thank you,” Grace said with a righteous air when I offered her a flute of bubbly. Grace Chapman was two years older than me, making her thirty-six. She was as plain as a donut without glaze. Her marriage to Manny eight years earlier had been the culmination of a May/September romance. He had at least twenty