This morning I had coffee and four slices of toast for breakfast.

The coffee ran all over the counter because I put too much water into the machine and the thermos part overflowed. I had butter and organic raspberry honey on the toast, only it was not officially certified organic, because that involves expensive paperwork in the EU now, the farmer’s wife told me, but she assured me that it was, really, organic. You may think it’s funny that we have a farmer’s wife in our kitchen at breakfast, but that’s how we live here in Austria.

The honey didn’t taste of raspberries, either, and Alpha and I got into a discussion of just how raspberry it really was. It tasted like regular honey. I suppose the beehives were next to a raspberry field or something, but hard to limit the bees to the raspberries and keep them from flying over to the woods next door or the apple orchard.

My uncle the Peasant used to live in a house in Washington State that had a beehive in the walls. As a child I used to put my ear to the wall and listen to them humming in there. Outside, you could stand and watch them fly into their hole in the siding behind a large, generations-old kerria japonica bush.

The things you do when you don’t have television.

We have a big kerria japonica in our back yard now, to remind me of home.