Linksy Bits: Bees in the Walls
AJLT ends, listen to your tomatoes, and pen people are the best people, no?
Before we get to our AJLT recap, this story showed up randomly four times last month in conversation. As woo girls know, that means it needs to get out to someone else.
The house we built wasn’t not part of the downfall. I can admit that slice of it.
It was a 1971 funky split-level modern house on 3-acres of marshland that had one owner, until us. Six bedrooms and a pool for something like $350K in 2001. Impossible now, especially in that neck of the woods.
But we were a blooming six-pack of humans and food was our language so we tricked the lower level out with a massively cool commercial-grade kitchen and an in-wall wood fired pizza oven. It was so very cool. It was so very not cheap. It was like buying another house and smashing it into this house. And my husband had a bit of an issue with financial compartmentalization. A thing I was (willingly?) blind to at the time.
We really did have the best parties.
And the kids had foosball battles with sleepovers on every surface, and the crab apple tree out front would explode with pink exuberance for graduation parties, and my fire pit near the woods sat witness to booyahs and Burn Parties, and the Not Yet Giant Baby and I would cuddle on the upper deck outside my room in the fresh spring air and count the marsh’s Benders, which are red wing black birds confidently grasping a reed and leaning in.
I really, really loved this house. I was good at it.
The marriage, it turned out, not so much.
I couldn’t imagine giving up this house, so I fought hard to keep it. I had picked out the tile, I knew the flow of every whorl on the birch paneled walls, my iconic pork shoulder came from only that brick oven, there were quarters embedded in the foyer floor because I thought that was hilarious: who would even be able to live here? Those were my magics.
Plus there was one more kid to shepherd through high school, was it fair that Jake lose the party house with a pool and pizza oven because his dad was a tool?
But the truth was, that as the marriage was dissolving, so had been the house. The husband who was increasingly no longer there was also not finishing the crown molding project in the bedrooms, or the re-carpet on the landing. There was also a black mold situation I can’t bring myself to talk about.
I was keeping it together for all the humans and trying to keep it together for a 3,000 sq ft house equally, with a full time job, two part time gigs, and a side study as a chlorine chemist (IYKYK).
So I fought with banks and creditors for more than a year, pushing deadlines off and paying lawyers money I didn’t have, trying to hold on.
Because if I lost this house, who was I?
One morning, as I was waking up, I felt something brush by my face. I wiped it away, thinking mosquito, but as I began to open my eyes I could hear a low buzzing in the room. I looked straight up and there were two bees bumping against the window over my head.
Another one joined them and my eyes traced back along its flight to its origination: there was a hole in the wall where it joined the ceiling and bees were very calmly pouring out of it. Just: having a fly into some newly discovered land.
I laid there for a full minute not quite believing that I was actually awake, that this wasn’t another stress dream. This was a bee bedroom now. Later I realized they had built a massive hive in the wall from a hole near a sconce on the deck, and then chewed a hole in the drywall to come visit. So, another thing to deal with.
Telling the harrowing tale of bees in the walls to the ladies, it was my Stephanie Meyer who said to me, “Dude. I think the house is trying to tell you something. It’s trying to kick you out. You might need to listen.”
I don’t know if anything could have hit harder. The kindest sting.
Days later, bringing it up with the last kid while we ate summer tomatoes, I mentioned that it was likely that we would have to move.
Jakey boy said, rather shockingly matter-of-factly, “I mean, it’s not like this place has been full of happiness for a while.”
Somewhere else then.
And with the flutter of glass wings, a view of a new land.
What to Cook for When there are bees in the walls. And while it’s a less than ideal situation, as you’ve heard they make horrible roommates, you understand they were on a mission. In fact, you know that the ancient Greeks considered them to be divine creatures that could navigate the realms, carrying messages between the living and the dead, the humans and the gods. And since portals gonna portal, you set your tired mind to dinner. But a BLT feels like: a lot (do you use mayo on the bread, do you add an egg which means a new pan, does avocado count as a bread spread, so much function). So you listen to your tomatoes, because you’ve been inspired by the bees, and you just let them tell you their secrets.
Tomato Steaks
Cut your beefy tomatoes into fat 2-inch slices.
Get them on a plate.
Top with a very personal combo such as:
Shallots and blue cheese crumbles
So much salt that you glance at your Oura ring app, and pepper.
Goat cheese and olive oil
Crackled potato chips and Duke’s mayo
A religious shower of good parm (say when)
Thin slivers of avocado and baco-bits
Not pepperoni, that’s not what we’re doing today
But yes salami, because there is a difference
Apparently, peanut butter?
Fish sauce and chili crisp
Fried SPAM and pineapple, is something someone else said.
Cut with knife and fork, eat and breathe.
An Actual Shit Show, really?
I still can’t believe we ended this iconic, ground-breaking series with a Thanksgiving poo. Multiple actually. On screen!
The ladies deserved better. We deserved better. All season.
What we got for a finale was a tight 34 minute closing of small loops. I don’t want to even recount the lazy circles of plot lines for you, but it was all dotted with slight introspective sentences about marriage, expectations that society puts on women, and a very simple dip into the idea that you can feel good in your own company without a partner.
I think in essence it ended how it should have, with Carrie reveling in the life she’s built (full of friends, kids calling her Auntie, pies, a flouncy skirt, a killer pad, a creative life), but that could have been a more meaningful journey if they had taken more time, or started earlier by cutting the Aiden distraction down to some opening episodes (I almost started ranting again about precious real estate and the two-episode deodorant plot, but I won’t). And I’m sorry, but couldn’t we have ditched the whole Thanksgiving Is Hard trope for one last room full of the women? Sure that’s a trope on its own, but for a finale it would have brought home the SATC scene when Charlotte says that they are each other’s soulmates.
This episode was as uncomfortable with itself as we were, and it tried to resolve it with a Pretty Woman move. “The woman wasn’t alone, she was on her own” feels a little like Julia Robert’s “She rescues him right back” which was added to the script so that she would do the movie. It’s nice, but it feels like a concession.
Remember that allll of this was started because of a book by Candace Bushnell released in 1996. The same Bushnell just wrote a killer NY Mag piece in June titled Sex After 60 in Sag Harbor, and I have to say: it has more cha-cha than the AJLT writer’s room and sadly shows to what kind of heights we might have taken this last dance to. Alas, we got poo and a Gen X caricature show.
I wish we could get a re-do, but it feels like this is finally it. The real deal this time as the credits closed with a call back to the OG Sex and the City theme, and what with all the Carrie montage memorials put online by SJP, it seems she is DONE.
And who can blame her? Putting a lifetime of work into a character that people online are hate-watching? I know the chatter around the first few seasons got spicy and could lean into interesting controversial takes, but this round just felt more fraught. There were definitely bees in those walls.
And so we let the ladies run off to their good nights, LTW coddling her George Washington, Seema ushering in her jeans era with Hot Gardener, Charlotte bonking her Harry, Miranda finding her Joy, and Carrie untamed and living for the moment.
Pen People: this one’s for you.
PLEASE follow this Thread and see THOUSANDS of comments from our fellow pen people. There was even a woman who posted from a Japanese pen shop and offered to buy the kid some elite Pilot Hi-Tec C .4mm fine points.
» Y’all know I’m a Le Pen girlie.
» The only thing I wanted for my high school graduation was a Waterman. Still have it.
» I do have Sharpies in every room in the house.
» And if you’re moving into pencil territory, there’s nothing but Blackwing for me.
Find your tribe, never let them go.
We love those bees. 🐝❤️ This is perfection.
Poetry, all of it. Tomatoes and PB tho, nah. I ordered those Sharpies last night after reading your Thread. And thank you for watching AJLT "with" me, because it was indeed a shitshow but also more and final. 🩷