The old man sat looking at the Mexican honey wasp nest sitting in a wood bowl on his coffee table. He remembered when he found it in a field many years ago, still hanging from a tree attached to a small limb, abandoned. He had carefully broken off the limb and carried the delicate nest home, still hanging from part of the limb, where it has sat in various locations since then. It was a remarkable thing, he thought. He knew how the wasps had built it, chewing off small pieces of wood with strong jaws and masticating them with their saliva into paper pulp. It was a slightly elongated globe, about ten inches long and eight inches wide. Hundreds of small, perfectly formed hexagonal cells were covered by a thin, papery shell, though now the gray shell had flaked off about half of the globe over time, exposing the cells. Some pieces of the shell hung loose; he had carefully laid them back on when they had fallen off. He knew the purpose of the cells, of course, which was to hold the wasp eggs and larvae until they pupated and became marvelous winged adults. He also knew that Mexican honey wasps were fairly gently and not overly aggressive. None of this concerned him now, even though his wonder of the thing had never faded. From a distance it almost looked like an asteroid, half of its surface blasted off by a collision with a smaller space rock. Its shell was not perfectly smooth; it was layered, like the icing on a round cake that a child had spread. For its size it was surprisingly lightweight and delicate. If he had left it outside last night, where he once kept it, in the forty mile per hour winds from the front, it would have been blown over the fence. Its original purpose far outweighed its actual weight, he thought, which was the other problem that bothered him. After all that work, it now seemed to have no purpose. He had rescued it from a faster decay, but there it sat, no longer functioning as it had been designed. An artifact of nature, a relic of life. Over the years, he had often sat and pondered the gray relic, as he did now. He knew it would never serve that purpose again, but the question was: where to put it ? Over the years he had moved it around. At first he had put it outside, just in case there were ghosts of larvae hiding inside that might emerge. Of course, that never happened. At one point, he even put it high on a shelf in the garage, just to get it out of the way. But he kept looking at it whenever he went there. So he brought it inside and placed it on the fireplace mantle for a while, a place of honor. But it was unstable there, so he moved it to rest on the top of a tall wicker plant stand, where it sat for a long time. As the paper shell continued to flake off, though, he moved it to the bedroom on top of the chest of drawers. That was the worst place. So tonight he brought it back into the living room and carefully placed it in an ornate wooden bowl, picking up the pieces of the paper shell that fell off and positioning them as best he could to cover the egg cells. If nothing else it deserved that respect, he thought, even though he knew there was nothing left to protect in the cells. So there it sat. Silent, but speaking of its once perfectly conceived purpose. Maybe I will just put it in the middle of the floor, he thought. Then I will have to walk around it, and that might be a better place of honor. Tired of pondering where to place the nest next, the old man got up and looked out the window at the cold wind still blowing and tried to remember what purposes he had set for himself today. He no longer had to go to work, so his day was free. [photos by Ray Huffman]
