Everyone’s errands ends with a swarm of wasps, right? That’s normal…

July 12, 2024November 1, 2025Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

From the editor’s desk

It’s Friday–

For me, that doesn’t mean a whole lot because I work when I need to work and since I love the editing, reading and publishing that I do and I often forget to stop. I work seven days a week and regularly schedule day trips and small outings to force myself to take a mental break.

That’s really not even here nor there for today’s tale.

I woke a little late today, and rest is always a good thing, so I didn’t make it to my desk until about 8 a.m. Larry Sceurman, author of The Death of Big Butch and Coffee in the Morning from Parisian Phoenix Publishing, had sent me a story and asked for my editorial services. He was stopping by at 9:30 so that I could scan the cartoon he made to accompany the story and then we planned to have a breakfast meeting.

After that, (which included for me eggs benedict as Larry and I continue our tour of local diners– we’ve done Big Papa’s before it closed, then Palmer and now Williams’), I came home and looked at some of the text Ralph Greco sent me on his upcoming article for a major publication, and received an email from Thurston Gill about prepping a Phulasso course catalog and a text from Joseph Swarctz about his upcoming new picture book Sprinkles Did It!

I was feeling sluggish (all those yummy diner fried potatoes?) so I poured myself an iced coffee.

I got a text from Eva-the-no-longer-a-Teenager. I needed to deliver posters to Barnes and Noble for next weekend’s Parisian Phoenix Book Lovers’ Celebration and she needed to pick up come cat food from a client that their cat won’t eat. And she said I could swing by Panera and grab an iced coffee for tomorrow.

Into the car I go.

Phase One: Barnes & Noble

I run into Barnes & Noble as a cool summer rain falls upon the Southmont Shopping Center. The manager is behind the customer service desk and I voice to him my concerns that the posters aren’t the right size.

Now, I don’t know if the designer didn’t resize them when I increased the size or whether the printer we used couldn’t accommodate the size or whether I screwed up somewhere else along the way, but the posters are too small for the standard displays and took big for the table toppers. So if I can find some big sheets of Parisian Phoenix pink poster board I might have to swing by the store and matte them.

Sometimes things just don’t work the way you planned.

If being a small business owner has taught me anything, it’s that when these discombobulations happen, you can’t get angry. You can only roll with it the best you can and develop alternative plans on the fly.

And then…

I hop in the car. We run to Panera and I grab my Sip Club beverage. We drive through lovely developments where a strange number of homes have decorative boulders somewhere along their driveway.

Eva pulls into her client’s driveway and remarks that the truck is not present. She gets out of the car. The car yells because it is still running and she has taken the electronic fob. An email slides into my in box, and I see that it’s my automated response from Substack. I had put together an automated welcome email for “Larry’s Stories” and subscribed my junk address so I could see it. I glanced down at my phone so I could forward it to Larry so he could also see it.

I heard a strange buzz, like there was a bee in the car. But then I heard more buzz. I looked up. There was several wasps in the car. I had the windows cracked, so I thought maybe if I opened the sun roof they would exit, especially since they were gathered around the rearview mirror. (I was in the passenger seat.)

Swarm of wasps

A beautiful collection of colorful flowering shrubs sat outside the car to my right. I opened the sun roof and more wasps entered the car. The wasps were swarming the car!!! I made myself as small as I could in the seat, because the wasps had no interest in me. Obviously they did not see me as a threat and I wanted to keep in that way.

My daughter and the wife of her client, whom she had never met, came out of the house and Eva immediately noticed something was off and there was a weird amount of insects around the car. I hopped out, because I didn’t want anyone to come to close to the car without knowing that the car had a bit of an infestation.

Once I exited the car, the homeowner realized that her husband’s work truck had a wasp nest on it, which he had perhaps knocked down, and in any case, he had driven away. So these wasps were confused and homeless and probably search our car for their missing house.

I carefully slipped into the drivers seat and backed up the car farther down the driveway, with the door open, hoping the wasps would gravitate to the garden and not my Volkswagen. We closed the windows except for a crack in the sunroof and hoped.

When we reentered the car about five minutes later, only about four remained inside the car and as we started to drive away that number dropped to two. And one I accidentally squished in the window.

To make sure none of them followed us home, Eva jumped on the highway to outrun the bastards.

The clients felt terrible and they even texted us a photo of the original wasp nest. I can see why the wasps were confused.

“Review”: Pick-Your-Own-Bouquet Outing at Terra Fauna Farm

July 6, 2021July 6, 2021Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

This one brings to mind memories of my mother’s flower gardens during my childhood— her lovingly tending her petunias, impatiens, zinnias and marigolds. I begged for straw flowers, snap dragons and “blue angels.” I thought of my mother’s gifted green thumb while frolicking in these fields.

Last week, knowing my teenager had left me home with no car, my sweet friend Joan had invited me to a pick-your-own-bouquet workshop at Terra Fauna Farm. Joan is a member of their CSA.

For those who don’t know, like the teenager, let me explain the concept of CSA or “Community Supported Agriculture.”

First, some history. Our area (the Lehigh Valley/Slate Belt of Pennsylvania) is traditionally primarily rural, with a few small cities scattered here and there and one of the largest cities in Pennsylvania on the one side (Allentown) and the Poconos on the other. New Jersey lies to the east and more rural areas to the West.

I once served as an advisory board member for the Penn State University Cooperative Extension. I completed six years, many of those as Secretary. I never realized how passionate I was about the area’s agricultural heritage until I had this opportunity. I took it for granted.

I grew up in the rural Slate Belt in the 1980s where most of my neighbors were dairy farmers. One literal neighbor had a green house business. And our school bus route cut through a pig farm. Pig farms smell bad, by the way.

Corn fields. Horses. 4-H. Farm Shows. Future Farmers of America. Horticulture and Agriculture as high school science electives. I took horticulture one and it was an amazing exposure to organic gardening (in 1990 before it became trendy), flower arrangement, and gardening. You haven’t lived until you’ve washed a greenhouse of poinsettias with lye soap to kill the white flies.

At that time your parents were either farmers or blue collar workers. My dad was a diesel mechanic.

During the last two decades, farm land has given way to suburban developments and warehousing.

And to compete with large commercial farm and maintain some smaller farms as viable, farmers have embraced the CSA model.

In a CSA arrangement, when selecting his crops and ordering his seeds, the farmer also contacts those who have expressed interest in supporting the farm. These supporters then purchase a share of the season’s crops by sending money in advance. There’s usually a “full share” customarily enough for a family of four and a “half share” for those who don’t have a family or are timid about how much produce they can use.

The farm typically shares what crops they want to plant and the supporter can usually cater their share to their likes and dislikes.

The farmer uses that money to buy his supplies and pay his bills until the crop is ready. And has a guaranteed market for some of his crop.

Terra Fauna (located in Northampton, Pa.) planted a flower and herb garden on what I believe they said used to be their cow pasture. For $5, you can pick a bouquet.

As I mentioned, they had planned a workshop for last week but the heat and the threat of thunderstorms made them postpone until July 5.

Joan took photos and the teenager and I indulged our witchy senses and gathered blooms and herbs from the rows.

We spent $26.50 on extras— a farm fresh cucumber, two zucchini, a quart of new potatoes, a pound of local honey harvested this past Saturday, some garden herb cheese spread and a coffee flavored yogurt smoothie which I think tasted like a milkshake.

The teenager came home and spread her cheese spread on some crisp fresh cucumber and for the sandwich effect added “chicken in a biskit” crackers I bought over the weekend. The juxtaposition of ultra-processed and farm fresh was not lost on her.

Perhaps before the end of the summer, Joan and I can “do lunch” at the farm on one of her weekly CSA pick up days. Which, as a country girl, let me tell you this one truth:

The only way to eat sweet corn is fresh off the farm. If you’re buying sweet corn at a local big box grocery store, I’m sad for you.

Our own Walking Purchase: Forest Bathing

May 28, 2020May 28, 2020Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

I asked Gayle if she could think of an outdoor, quarantine-appropriate activity for the three of us— herself, me and the teenager.

She suggesting “forest-bathing” at Salisbury Township’s Walking Purchase Park.

According to Gayle’s research, forest-bathing is:

Forest bathing is the practice of slowly moving they the woods involving all senses. As you gently walk you breath deeply and it reduces stress, increase positive thinking, and energy levels.

Why not?

The park features several trails. We walked part of the yellow “Sweet Delight” trail and part of the red “Lenni” trail.

Gayle was disappointed we only walked about 2.5 miles, but I think the last mile was straight up hill— about 18 flights of stairs according to the Apple Health app.

Forest-bathing yielded a very Thoreau sounding journal entry for me.

I am surrounded by unblooming May flowers hearing the buzz of gnats as they swarm into my ears. There are birds chattering like squealing monkeys. The train hollers in the distance: a choo-choo bird.
A breeze cascades across the woods, a floral wave of rain drops and sunlight. I revel in the stillness.
The woods around me has a conversation, but as a human, can I learn the language?

When we got home, the teenager baked her grandmother’s famous corn bake— a recipe I believe she got in high school home ec classes. So it’s got to be 50+ years old.

Encounter at Nearpoint

May 27, 2020Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Tonight, the teenager and I are watching the pilot episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, “Encounter at Far Point.” We ate some of our gourmet Double Good popcorn that the teenager sold to pay for her marching band trip that has now been canceled.

It allowed me to be a little punny with my title— as while the Enterprise explores the far reaches of the galaxy, the teenager and I had our own encounter near home, visiting a dear friend and mentor who may not even realize how key she has been in my personal and professional development.

And she has a beautiful piece of property near us where the teenager could sip their own special lemo-tea and galavant through the sun-kissed woods.

On the way home, the teenager and I stopped at Wendy’s for cheeseburger kids’ meals for dinner as I had some volunteer work to do in the evening— we opted to postpone our proposed vegetarian Mexican dinner.

Between my two phone meetings for my volunteer commitment, I went for a walk with my neighbor. The walk is about a mile and a half, but for some reason it registers as about three miles on the Apple Health app.