Hornets! Hornets!

Three days ago I attacked a nest of wasps.  I was hacking out a trench between two mounded planting beds that, by appearance, hadn’t been attended to in several seasons, when the world suddenly receded to the distant background and what can only be described as a sting, bright and urgent, flashed through the muscle between my thumb and forefinger.  For a few seconds there was only me and the hand, which insisted on my undivided attention.  I never saw my attacker.  I responded by voicing a randomly selected profanity, stepping away from my work, and rubbing some mud on the painful spot.  Then I stupidly went back to hacking at the same location.  Ten seconds later, I simultaneously saw at least 5 wasps fly out of the brush, felt another intense sting explode on my cheekbone near my ear, and another on my calf near my knee.  I looked down and swatted one of the combatants away from my leg while clumsily jumping out of the trench and through the mud, away from the source of the pain.  I stayed away from that trench thereafter and spent the next thirty minutes flinching away from dragonflies.  About two hours later, my hand looked like the hand of a giant baby; pudgy and lacking knuckles, and I had difficulty making a fist.  The hand continued to look ridiculous for two solid days and it still doesn’t look the same as the other one.

     

Today, after one more day of work on the farm, I’ll pack my bags, get some dinner and try to sleep for awhile; then at 2am I’ll get into The Captain’s Honda, where I’ll ride as a passenger to Bangkok Airport, from whence I’ll take a series of flights that, over the course of 32 hours, will chase the sun, bringing me to Boston on the same calendar day that I left Bangkok.   It will be my first time on U.S. soil since July of 2009. 

Several travelers have asked how I feel in anticipation of this event and after answering vaguely a few times, I have come to realize that I look forward to it without reservation.  After almost two years in Dubai and almost a year on the road, it feels like an adventure of sorts to return to the homeland for an extended period.  I am anxious to see friends and family and I am equally anxious to see how it feels to be there, to examine myself and notice subtle or dramatic shifts between my current self and the self that left, or possibly to find that I’m still exactly the same.  Although I doubt the latter.