isoglossia

Aleksander had a brief meeting with a wasp yesterday that ended rather badly. I have a zero-tolerance wasp policy, but I am a big fan of the honeybee and her works. Here we have an example of the preternaturally industrious Carniolan Grey beavering away for the benefit of her human masters.

As I was lying face-down on a bed of hot grass and tiny, fragrant wildflowers (and also: bees), Zdenka, one of the soldiers in the logistics unit, was yelling at me that the little purple blossoms I was photographing (she couldn’t see the bees) are good for making some kind of tea that is healthful and whatnot. She told me the flowers are called materina dušica (‘mother’s breath soul’). When asked what particular ailment the tea is good for she said, “everything”. When this was met with a small but evidently galling bit of skepticism, she advised asking the internet.

Slovenes will make tea out of your shoes if you stand still long enough and then they’ll give it to you for the hangover you got from drinking their schnapps made from flowers.

A good month later than usual, the weather here has finally erupted into painfully beautiful spring. The pale purple carpet of tiny tea-bound flowers murmurs with hundreds of diligent bees. The air outside the front door of our apartment building is heavy with a flower scent that would be cloying overkill in a perfume. Adam’s little bean plantation has cracked the soil asunder and thrust up his precious little plants whose daily progress thrills and baffles him. Cut grass throws off the snappy smell of freshly shelled peas, and the towering, candle-like cones of horse chestnut blossoms are filling the air with down that drifts in the open window of my office. Birds twitter and chirp, and a distant cuckoo underlines their formlessness with a drowsy but metronomic call for Cocoa Puffs.

In some ways, I will certainly miss this place after July.