Honey and Brown Sugar

Autumn has a smell before it has a look.

When the trees are still mostly green, dried out around the edges but not in glorious color yet, you can smell the change coming on. It smells like honey when the ground is wet, and brown sugar when it’s dry.

It finally rained good and hard last weekend, but now it’s bright again. The nights have been a little chilly, and the days just cool enough to make walking pleasant. I wish I could go for a hike, and soon I can: we scraped together enough that Jimmy swears he can talk his friend the dealer into giving us a discount on an old beater. This week, we find out if he’s right. Keep us in your prayers that it works out. But for now, I walk in my neighborhood. Yesterday I went round and round LaBelle, up around South Bend Avenue to Belleview and back, smelling the brown sugar. Where I found a patch of the first fallen leaves I stepped on them noisily, grinding them into the pavement. They made a sound like cracking the top of a creme brulee, and life felt worth living.

What’s that Bible verse about honey coming out of a rock?

Today, Jimmy’s boy came over with another of his friends. It wasn’t the Artful Dodger; it was one of the children who helped pick strawberries. They wanted to see what was left of the garden: not much this time of year. The sunflowers are dry stakes. The tomatoes have only a few flavorless fruit left to give me. The autumn beans are ripening so slowly that I won’t get more than a few. Only the kale likes October; it’s waist high. Still, the garden smelled like a sweet shop.

The boys asked if they could make themselves useful pulling up my dead sunflowers, and I said “yes.” The demolition project took less than five minutes. Jimmy’s boy dragged the six-foot canes up and down the garden, explaining that he was going to build a trap for the raccoon he once saw meddling with my compost. The guinea pig got to come outside and watch from the warm grass under a laundry basket. Even Adrienne came out to see what the fuss was about. I sat on the porch steps, supervising, warning the children not to hit each other as they constructed their trap, breathing in the October air.

I thought again about honey coming out of the rock. Why does the Bible say honey comes out of a rock?

Jimmy’s boy shrieked in alarm; I looked up to find him staring at two varmints. They were spotted lanternflies, an invasive insect that have been devouring Jefferson County. I’d already warned Jimmy’s boy about the spotted lanternfly. We had the talk about not swatting most flying insects, because many are beneficial and we mustn’t upset the ecosystem, but the spotted lanternfly is a plague.  Now, he hates them more than I do.

“Hit them with something hard!” I commanded.

The “something hard” he found was a loose brick from the porch, and it did the job with a satisfying crack.

“Those bugs are all over the tree in the vacant lot!” said the boy who helped me pick strawberries.

There is a venerable old walnut tree in the middle of the vacant lot where the gang plays football, and I love it. It’s majestic. Sometimes I just sit in my garden and stare at it over my neighbor’s fence, watching the wind shake the tree’s branches. The thought of that tree being devoured by those horrible pests made fury rise in my throat. I’d been pretending to be a Tolkein elf all summer, but right now I was an Entwife, and the orcs were devouring my favorite tree.

I darted inside and helped Adrienne prepare a spray bottle of dish soap and water. When I came out, both boys had armed themselves with weapons made from the thick woody stems of the sunflowers.

“All right,” I said, handing the bottle to Adrienne. “Now, Adrienne is the general. You two are soldiers and you have to follow everything we say. Charge!”

We fell on the invaders with all of our might: Adrienne with the spray bottle and the boys with their sticks. I took off one shoe and started swatting the orcs all over the trunk, and stomping them with the other shoe where they fell. Again and again, we circled the tree trunk and attacked. Again and again, they darted at us with a low buzz; the boys shrieked and jumped back, then came forward to fight again. Finally, triumphant, surrounded by the corpses of at least a hundred Uruk-hai, we paused for breath.

We couldn’t possibly fight off the whole invasion, but we’d cut down the number of bugs. The tree had a much better chance of staying healthy. We’ll have another battle tomorrow. Around us was a steady drip-drip and the  smell of honeydew– not the melon but the syrup that the lanternflies secrete. A different kind of sweet than the smell of Autumn.

Why does the Bible say something about honey in a rock? Matthew 7:9 ridicules the idea that a father would give his son a stone when he asks for a loaf of bread, but apparently at another time somebody had to eat a rock?

I looked it up later, after the boys were gone. It’s mentioned in two places. Deuteronomy says that when Jacob fled to the desert, God nourished him with honey from a rock and oil from the crag.

And then there’s Psalm 81, which ends: