My life so far: 29,220 days and counting.

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Remember the Reader’s Zoom this Saturday April 11!  CLICK HERE to copy zoom link or to sign in on Saturday morning. Dialogue and discussion with Colleen O’Brien, author of Baited, a thriller based in Glacier National Park. We will talk about Nature and Place as characters in our stories. Starts @ 9:00 AM/Pacific US time—you can do the math.

And on April 16, 2026, I turn 29,220 days old. You can do the math. It means I was conceived on a hot August day with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the trauma of WWII, floating molecules in the breath of my young parents. It means I was born on a spring morning in Montana when millions of my grandfather’s bees were hurling themselves from hives to clover buds and war crimes trials were starting up in Europe and Japan.

These 29,220 days are the time blocks that built my life. I have awakened in any number of moods on these days. I have wasted days, raced unthinkingly through hours as though life was an endless Instagram scroll. I have been brought to my knees with grief and awe, flung myself passionately into love and writing and work. I have made mistakes, bad choices, unwittingly caused harm, and wished I could roll back time. I am walking a yellow brick road with most of the bricks behind me and a decade that curves into terrain unknown.

And here I am, turning 80 years old.

I enter this birthday with profound gratitude. Still here. Still healthy and cogent. Living with a beloved partner and

Ann & me among the 8 million protesting.

held within—and contributing to—a loving community. And I have the stamina to keep practicing my passion for stories, for writing, for creating spaces where stories can be respectfully shared.

 I’m starting a Substack column called Backstories, because at 80 most of my stories are back there, trailing behind me, swirling around me, awaiting articulation into the unimaginably huge conversation humanity is having at this time.

Standing on this threshold, I have the audacity to pray for 3,650 more days. Another 1/8 of life and, in my aging body and eldering years, I vow to live ever more consciously. I not only want my remaining days to count, I want to literally count them. I want to see each sunrise as a copper coin and to deposit that penny at sunset into a pottery jar marked “Prayers for Change.” Or maybe I can construct a calendar filling one wall where I cross off each day, noting some gratitude, no matter the internal weather of my emotions or the terrors of the wider world.

I am old enough now to know the preciousness of time. I step into this decade with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of purpose. And on the day I depart—whenever and however that comes— I want my last word to be “Thank you.”

April 17—my first day of being eighty.

I received this as a gift and no designation of who it might be from. Whoever you are, thank you. I will plant many more words in this vase.

If you want to help me celebrate, the best gift you can give me is to go online and deposit good reviews for any of my books! They don’t have to be long or intricate, a few words to encourage the next reader. “I read Seven Whispers 20 years ago and it’s still on my bedside table…”  Or, “Life’s Companion is my favorite journal writing friend and teacher.” Or, “My book club loved The Beekeeper’s Question. Don’t miss this story!”

All these titles are on Bookshop,  Amazon, and in BookClubs.com. Please love on Alyssa’s amazing audio in Audible or Libro or Spotify–wherever you have downloaded it. You can recommend it on Instagram and follow me @ChristinaBeeTrue and on Facebook as The Beekeeper’s Question by Christina Baldwin.

And Thank YOU for being part of my journey and letting me be part of yours.

Pray for PEACE. Pray for JUSTICE. Pray for the children whose days are just starting that they may live in a new world we insist into being!

A Hmmm in the Chaos

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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 30th 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

Bees and Buzz, Honey and Magic

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The next reader’s zoom call is May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific. Link at the end of the blog.

The first photograph of me, I am three months old, lying on a baby blanket in my baptismal dress on the lawn at my grandparents’ house. July, Montana, the buzz of bees pollinating raspberries and garden vegetables. My little body is stretched over summer-warmed grass.

I do not remember this in the comb of memory, but my body knows. Whatever ceremony has just occurred in the little Methodist church my grandfather stewards, the one occurring in this photo is the land itself binding me to this place.

That autumn, my parents will drive east to New Jersey where my father will continue post-War university studies.  I will spend my childhood in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota. I will never reside in Montana, but the West will always feel like home, and the Baldwin family will long identify this homestead as its spiritual source.  What Jeannine Ouelette calls, “a cartography of self.”

The summer I am five, we take the train from Indianapolis to Great Falls so my father can work the honey harvest, and my mother can join the daughters-in-law putting up garden produce for winter. Here my Montana memories begin. Picking raspberries, running through irrigation water, sucking honeycomb, and bees. Bees. Bees. Finally allowed to ride out to the bee yards in the honey truck with my grandpa and an uncle, I watch them work hives amid the buzzing swirl.

On our way back to the homestead, one loose bee, caught in the truck cab, stings me on the hand. I remember the sharp pang of it, my howl of surprise. My grandfather plucks the stinger out and sucks my thumb to draw out venom— his hands a calloused tenderness, his lips a blessing. He tells me, “Brave girl, Chrissie, you’re a real Baldwin now.” I am carried into the kitchen, turned over to the women, baking soda applied to my sting. There is supper around a family table, ice cream on the porch steps. Stories float like pollen in the evening air.

If this sounds like origin story to The Beekeeper’s Question: it is.

Over ten years—with so many variations of story shifting into place—the constant was the vocation of Leo Cooper, a combination of Protestant theology in the human community and the “protestant ethic” of hard-working bees. I drew upon memory rising through the summer visits that immersed me in the family mythos. I created story out of my DNA—those mitochondrial snippets that fed a synthesis of personal history beyond my ken—and from hours spent watching bees in action—asking for their guidance.

I studied A.I. Root’s tome, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, 1930 edition—the book my grandfather had propped on the bookcase next to his King James version of the Old & New Testaments. I read Tammy Horn’s BEES in America, How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (University of Kentucky, 2005). I read The Hive, The Story of the Honeybee and Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) by Bee Wilson.

Honeybees were brought to America by early English settlers in 1620. “European colonists brought an agrarian philosophy that depended on cows and bees to extend and define an agricultural legacy inherited from classical Greek and Roman writers.”  (Let alone, Old Testament references to the land of milk and honey.) The Indians called them “white man stinging flies,” their arrival linked to westward press of colonization. And one of the cultural compatibilities that supported the horrific importation of Africans into American slavery was how deeply interwoven cows and bees were in many African societies.  “As long as settlers had cattle and bees, they could be assured of the basic essentials—food, wax, medicine, candles, and clothing.” (p19 Bees in America)

Bees came into the Baldwin family in 1915 when a neighboring farmer was drafted into World War I and offered his hives to my grandfather for the duration. The man lived, but wasn’t interested in the bee business after the war, so the operation became “Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey.”  It grew to 500 hives spread out in a 50-mile radius that supported his eight children through the Depression and paid for college educations.

Homestead from the story

A lot of what Leo Cooper says in the story, comes from conversations with my father, Leo Baldwin, recalling his youthful years in Montana during his elder years living nearby.  He died in 2018, the book shaped enough that I committed to finishing it.

And then I came across Jacqueline Freeman’s profound gem, Song of Increase, Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World (Sounds True Press, 2016) and was introduced to the shamanic aspects of beekeeping. See her interview with Seth Godin here. I wish I could have had these conversations with my dad.

A lot of what Maire Cooper experiences in the story comes from Jacqueline’s book, and The Shamanic Way of the Bee, by Simon Buxton (Destiny Books, 2004) which introduced me to the long lineage of Bee Priestesses, the Melissae. The interweaving of bees with Celtic shamanism was in Maire’s blood and in the story, Leo’s bees awaken that within her.

And then there’s Sara Leedom, a global storycatcher honoring the Indigenous ways of beekeeping. Sara showed up in my memoir class to write about her travels to remote honey hunters. While I stayed home and wrote, she attended international bee conferences, including one in England that brought her in contact with the Melissae.

So, there’s a lot to think about, and a lot to honor in the lineage of bees. On these warm May days, I’ve been greeting the bumblebees diving into my rhododendron blossoms and yesterday I parked by a bee yard just to listen to the hum. Wherever you live, watch for them, and watch out for them. And if you’ve read The Beekeeper’s Question, join the zoom and join the buzz. Here’s the link: Saturday, May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific.

If you have any trouble, contact: christina@christinabaldwin.com

May there be love and honey in all our days.

Becoming “Doc”

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It’s a marvelous sign when readers of The Beekeeper’s Question so identify with characters they want to become like them. For several months now I have had the honor of conversing with book club members, both in person and on zoom—mostly women in their 60’s/70’s—inspired by the character “Doc,” as a role model of practical older woman wisdom.

For those who haven’t yet read the book, Doc is Jereldene Jesperson, a seventy-something, unmarried country physician serving the rural community of Pigeon River, Montana. She is the friend of widower, Leo Cooper, the local parson, beekeeper, and father of sons, one in the war, one in the valley. The Cooper family, in which Doc is an honorary auntie, is central to the story and to the community’s ability to make their way through the early years of World War II.

Franklin, Maire, Doc, Leo

Leo’s bee yards

Author, creativity coach and blogger, Sally Fox recorded an excellent podcast of me when the book came out last fall. (Click here to listen.) Recently she posted a blog about wisdom keepers and their important roles in the very real drama of our times. She writes:

One such wisdom keeper, Jereldene Jesperson, known to everyone as “Doc,”  stood out to me after reading The Beekeeper’s Question, a powerful novel by acclaimed Northwest writer Christina Baldwin. Set in an isolated Montana town in 1942, it tells the story of a family and community dealing with divides.

Doc is the family doctor—the only one the town could get. Though she arrived as an outsider, she tends to the bodies and souls of the valley with an open heart, caring even for those who once distrusted her. Over time, she becomes the wise woman people turn to in times of crisis.

I felt moved by her wisdom, comforted by her presence, and left the book feeling like we needed more Docs—seasoned by life, and able to offer their practical wisdom when the world seems to be running off the rails. You can find them everywhere if you know what to look for:

  • They are often older, though some are wise beyond their years.
  • They have known heartbreak but haven’t grown cynical. They still believe in goodness.
  • They observe deeply, understanding that no one is perfect. Their compassion bridges divides.
  • They don’t pretend to be above anyone. They burn their toast, drop dishes, and occasionally forget to put oil in the car. They get lonely and angry and sometimes need to talk themselves down from a high horse.
  • They love to laugh.
  • They are not easily rattled but will speak truth to power in a clear, no-nonsense way.
  • They have experienced life and death and understand the brevity of our time here.
  • They mentor and support others, grieving losses, celebrating victories.
  • They believe in America’s core values yet acknowledge how rights have not always been applied equally.
  • They know when to offer a hug, mug of tea, or spoonful of honey.
  • They love without concern for racial, cultural, or gender differences.
  • They bring perspective, a steady light in the storm, a reassuring shoulder. And a voice that says, “We’ll figure it out like we’ve always done.”
  • They have faced loss and aren’t afraid to love again.

The list reminded me how amazing it was to bring Doc to life; to put good words in her mouth and good actions in her community role. Readers ask me who she is modeled after, and the truest answer is  “the best of you/me/us.”

And Leo… well, he is based on the best aspects of the men in my family–men I would call “the stewards” of  masculinity, who can both tend and defend. He is seasoned, seeking, and rises again and again to cope with the challenges his family, congregation, and bees face in uncertainty.

This is true wisdom: femininity combined with fierceness: masculinity combined with tenderness. Leo and Doc are a team that brings physical and spiritual comfort into the room, serves tea with honey to the suffering. They show up, face into difficult conversations, counsel the younger generation, love the babies and children, hold onto their values. Right now, I see their faces everywhere in the protests rising across America. We are becoming Doc. Becoming Leo

My oldest cousin–age 95, marching in protest. Doc indeed!

I notice how a large proportion of  the protesters are white-skinned and grey-haired. Some people are lamenting, “Where are the youngers?” They’re busy–trying to survive financially, reassure their children (and each other), hold onto meaning in a world where meaning is shattered daily. Our job–the elders–is to get out there and raise our voices. Our generation is responsible for a lot of this mess: so it’s our responsibility to call it back. And it’s time to use our white privilege to stand in front of those being targeted: immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and to make alliances, to reach out, open dialogue, stand fierce, stay tender. As Doc and Leo reassure each other, “We’ll figure it out.” That’s our job now. See you there–in our communities, making good trouble.

Moving into active autumn

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The last morning of August. This is the view across our front yard, looking at the neighborhood, Puget Sound water, foothills and bare mountains, clouds pinkening from a cast of eastern sunrise. I am writing on the deck porch with a cup of tea: everything still. A geranium is reading over my shoulder. I claim an hour of pause before the world tumbles in with news, polls, predictions, unrelenting requests for attention, donations, activism—you know.

I think this is what happened in the past six weeks.

What is happening in the United States right now is huge! We are an entire nation attempting to pull out of a graveyard spiral. This is an aviation term for when a pilot is attempting a turn or spin and gets disoriented by the inner ear calibrations of what is “level.” The plane gets sucked into a gravitational pull from which neither the machine nor the pilot can recover. Think about that a minute: and the minutes just before, where there is still the possibility of reorientation, righting the plane, maintaining equilibrium even though your inner ear is screaming signals to your brain that you’re doing it wrong.

I learned this term many years ago on a long flight home from teaching, sitting next to a stranger who began his harrowing story by commenting, “I used to fly this route myself, had my own plane…” After explaining his near-death experience, how he’d almost killed himself, his wife, and two best friends, spiraling into Lake Michigan, he vowed to never pilot again. “The guys in a jet cockpit have a lot more instrumentation, education, experience, and intervention by the plane itself than I had.”  I smiled wanly, we changed the subject, but the term, its meaning, and disastrous outcome have come back to me at many turning points—  both personal and collective.

And I have to admit, there were times earlier this year when I feared my country and the world had entered the graveyard spiral and we would not be able to pull out. I quietly began asking myself: How will my spirit survive in a fascist society?

And then—KAMALA! And then—COACH! And now—US! For the People.

Warriors of political joy. Economics of Opportunity. Restoring the middle class. Reproductive Health. Safety for our children. Reasonable gun safety laws. Respect for the rule of law. Love who you love with pride. Climate policy. In a week the energy flipped from depression to enthusiasm, from resignation to activism. And this is a spiral of determination that must rise, not fall. That must fuel you, me, us into dialogue.

So here I sit, looking into my neighborhood—yes, I will make phone calls, yes, I will write postcards, and I am thinking how to reach extended family, acquaintances, islanders in the grocery store, strangers sitting next to me on a plane ride. I’m still collecting phrases from the Democratic National Convention that I hope will help me/us open conversations. The one I keep coming back to is Senator Raphael Warnock’s simple statement: “A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we want.” Ah, there is an opener I can image using… asking people: What is your prayer for the world? What do you want for this country, for women, for our children and grandchildren, for the planet?

Pulling out of a graveyard spiral is not easy: is not guaranteed: but trying is life-giving. When we fight we win: and we also “win” when we listen and speak from our hearts, meeting each other in this trembling moment of shift. Whatever else we are doing this autumn: there is also this imperative to Do Something, to be braver in breaking through barriers, kinder in our words and deeds, and to call ourselves to find the shared values that reside in many of us. In enough of us.

 

Amanda Gorman reading her poem at the DNC.

Writing on

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My father died.

Leo Baldwin was good at living, amazing at aging, determined to continue contributing up to his last days. He remained cheerful and present even while suffering the pain, indignities, and procedures of his final trip through the medical system. He was 98 years old and had never had an illness that he didn’t fully recover from with a little Tylenol and determination. It took him (and me, and us, and his community) a month to admit that his body wasn’t going to carry him any farther: he’d come to the end of his road.  And when he let go, he let go fully and was gone in 28 hours.

I am happy he was able to finish as himself. I am swept into waves of missing him. He was a much loved and respected central figure in our island lives. Ann and I move through a community that misses him as well. We pause and tell each other stories of his influence and friendship.

“A man and his butte,” photo by Becky Dougherty.

His local memorial service was teary and celebratory and the hall was packed with his wide range of friends. His descendants and extended family will gather in Montana next summer to bury some of his ashes in the soil that birthed him and to lift some of his ashes to the prevailing winds around those buttes and valleys.

And when my father died, my editor died.

I am writing a novel based on a fictionalized version of the town where my father grew up in west central Montana. The story takes place during the early years of WWII, when the first generation of homesteaders is ready for their sons to take over—but many of those sons are called into the war. The central story revolves around the Cooper family: an older beekeeper/Methodist minister named Leo and his relationship with his sons and their wives and the community at large.

My father, Leo, was the age of the young men in this story, and the lineage of the Baldwin family—the bees, the homespun ethics of Protestantism and citizenship, and the social justice issues that lay on this land—are a blend of family heritage and fiction. My ability to capture this time before I was born has been greatly enhanced by the spidery handwritten commentary my father added to my first drafts, and by the hours and hours of conversation at his dining table as we went through the story page by page. He found the typos, tweaked the dialogue, and dived into exploring the themes that activate the subtext of the story. He drummed into me his knowledge of bees and beekeeping.

This process was the most powerful experience of transmission I have ever received from another person. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver, in speaking of writing and rewriting said, “It is thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript.” We were pulling threads. I was writing my way forward, forging the story as the characters worded themselves into being. I was working the loom of the first draft. He was reflecting his way backward, seeing his life transformed and woven through the voices of the Coopers. It was a mystical interaction we each surrendered to in different ways.

All this past year I noticed him wearing down and wrote as fast as I could. He asked me once, “Does Leo Cooper need to die in this story? Does the father need to step aside to make room for the next generation to fully become themselves?” We talked about it as a literary device. We talked about it in terms of the emotional maturation of the story’s characters.

“I don’t want Leo to die,” I told him. “I love him…”

Blue eyes looking deep into brown eyes, he assured me “I know you have the courage to write what needs to be written.” I wept all the way home, the eleven miles between his house and mine. That was July: we had two more months before he would turn his attention to letting himself depart.

In the story, it is June 1943. The fight against fascism is not won. People don’t know the outcome; don’t know who will live or die, or what will ultimately be asked of them. They may be far from the battlefields, but their lives are fraught with the tension and chaos of a world in shift. A young war bride and her baby are making a place in the valley. Her faraway husband has just been injured in battle. The angry brother is trying to make peace in himself, his family, and the community. Under the hot Montana sun, Leo Cooper has a stroke in his bee-yards.

In my life, it is November 2018. The fight against fascism is not won. We don’t know the outcome; don’t know who will live or die, or what will ultimately be asked of us. The battlefield is everywhere. Our lives are fraught with the tension and chaos of a world in shift.

I rally my writing skills to reach back to then and to them; I reach my imagination into the brokenness and openness of the Coopers to discover the story map that can help me live honorably in our world of dire consequences in which the lives of ordinary people may shine.

Dad and I were on Chapter 42.

I am on Chapter 43.