There is a great elm on Cross Campus that is senescing with the changing weather. Her leaves, dripping with tattered gold, hang surprisingly low. They’re wispy, in a well-aged way. I walk by this great elm every day, but only recently noticed the sight of an eviction. A yellowjacket nest glutted with grubs weighed on the poor bough until her feeble arm could not withstand the burden, bending until it cracked, yet hanging on by a single strip of bark. Like a convoluted glob of mud, the nest was warped and abandoned. It hung lamely like a sagging tumor from the broken finger of the tree.
I thought of the day they laid concrete on my street block and the children had run their hands through the drying stone. I thought of the throwing wheel and the ashy gray clay that bore the marks of fingerprints. The mound of clay that turned and turned until handprints and uneven lumps melted with water droplets and spin cycles. The paper nest, unlike the forming bowl, only grew more uneven with age.
And within its parchment walls, tunnel systems and channels that once held the swimming worms now emptied. Forced out by wind and by storm until the hollows held space for the shadows of a colony. I wonder if the wasps’ little grub children played hopscotch in those spit-tunnel streets. If they played with their insect food and spat it out until their great mother chided them for it. I wonder if, before the great gust silenced the colony, the sisters set their sorrows aside and said their forgivings. I imagine the roar, the chaos, the fleeing.
Now, in an autumn emptiness, there is silence.
