A Hmmm in the Chaos

In these tumultuous weeks of autumn, 2025, I have been thinking about the generations in my novel, The Beekeeper’s Question. The impact and uncertainty of a faraway war rocks the community of Pigeon River, Montana in 1942-43. The young are swept into the situation, into the pressures of living through. Chapter 2 ends with a scene in the Philadelphia train station where Franklin Cooper is leaving for deployment and Maire, his bride, is standing on the platform among other women and families. (p14)

“At 30^th Street Station, she buried her face in his jacket, nervously twisting the brass button bright on olive-green wool. Franklin heaved his duffel onboard and jumped up behind it. His hand reached through an open window. Maire’s hand reached from the platform. The hiss of brakes releasing. Rail cars jerking. Fingers slipping. His hand waving among dozens of finger-tipped branches reaching from the train. He was a soldier. She was his wife. It was their war.”

Though circumstances are different, I hear a similar tenor of concern, endurance, determination to make a life in the midst of it all, in conversations with mid-life nieces, nephews, and our daughter. These conversations focus on the practical, applicable, manageable: How do I stabilize my employment? Get to the right place to make it through? Cope with rising costs for housing, cars, insurance, food, education? What’s going to still be in place when my children are grown?

And then there are the elders in the story: Doc, Leo, Josie. They are the holders of perspective and life experience. Doc and Leo talk about the edgy moment of their arrival, how the Homestead Act gave them land and title, how the Indians had been forced into reservations, and then how the presence of the Indian School and the suffering of Native children awakened them to history and social consequences they still grapple with decades later.

Doc, the only woman in her medical school at the turn of the twentieth century. Leo, carrying on a life-long discussion with the bees and the Bible. And Josie Shines the Light, attached to the spirit of the land and the soul of her people, protecting knowledge forbidden by colonization.

In a scene in Josie’s lodge, tucked in the backcountry hills of the reservation, Leo is crediting her with saving his adopted son’s life. (p128) Josie responds, “Your son owes his life to his own spirit and to Iistapatapiop, Creator. We who serve our people know each one must swim their own river. Jesse was drowning when he arrived, but he was reaching for the surface.”

Regret twisted Leo’s heart. “In that season of loss, I too was near drowning. I was not a good father when he needed me most.”

Her eyes bore into him. “He needed you most on the day he was born. You took him as your own. You gave him a name, a family, a childhood.”

Our circumstances are different, but in the peer conversations around me, I hear a similar awareness of how we both hold and cannot hold the generations behind us. These conversations focus on where we can exercise empowerment, protect moral values, take care of grandchildren, leave our stories for a future we will not see.

At a recent panel for community authors, one woman said into the crowd, “This is a book I keep in my car. Whenever I’m in the ferry line or waiting somewhere, I pull it out and read whatever pages come open. I need these people. They are spiritual guides from their time to our time.”

And now we can have it in the magical voicing that Alyssa Keene brought to the story. Join us for the reader Zoom, and a merry conversation on the spoken and written word.

SHORT – The Beekeeper’s Question Audio Sample Video