I'm just putting this image here, so that in two months' time — when my Arizona blood is quailing at the thought of a Utah winter, when I wrack my brain for any possible reason why I have not moved from this barren tundra of winter waste during the warmer months, when I despair at the thought of another six months of snow-slicked roads, clenched muscles and gritted teeth — I will look at this and say to myself: this is why you stay, year in and year out.

This is the soil and the sky of the summer months that perennially make of me a palimpsest, scraping clear the winter wrath and ruin, and lulling me into another season of warm and hazy air writ large beneath our eternal mountains.

About six years ago, when I was living on the Big Island of Hawai'i, I had the opportunity to visit the hives of Big Island Bees. That was my first exposure to the world of beekeeping, and I walked away with more than a jar of their white organic Ohi'a Lehua honey. I left wondering if I could ever do something like that — I had felt a weird affinity there, strangely at home with the idea, despite the fact I'd never owned so much as an ant farm growing up, and had always been a little timid around bees.

Fast forward a few years, and I see the staggering New Hive from the guys at Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons. I learned about colony collapse disorder and the real threat it posed to the bees and the animals whose food depends on bee pollination (read: all of them, including us). From that point, I did what I always do whenever I get keen to something: I started reading anything I could get my hands on, and annoying everyone with an endless barrage of tidbits that I'd just found out. I learned about the history of beekeeping, honey productions, and even the worship of bees; I read up on beekeepers today with hives on their apartment rooftops in big cities, about large-scale pollination operations, and different Honey varietals: tupelo, clover, wildflower. I started collecting honeys where I could find them: amber mountain honey from Mendon, Utah, Black buckwheat honey from New York, and deep-red honey from Taiga Cedar in Russia. Partly I was wondering how different they could possibly taste (very) and partly it seemed like a very small way to support the beekeepers doing what I thought I could not.

About a year later, I discovered Sunset magazine's One-Block Diet, an effort to espouse locavore trends and revive a lot of skills that had been slipping from the American landscape: serious gardening, canning, and beekeeping. Here were people with no real experience just jumping into apiculture, and I though "well, if they can do it…"

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This past Saturday, Dave and I drove out to the shore of the Great Salt Lake. The whole area is a study in gorgeous desolation: a bizarre amalgamation of a long-forgotten Coney Island-esqe amusements, Soviet-style refineries, and blasted heaths. A plywood billboard, barely 10 feet tall declares that the Great Saltair is closed, but the beach is still open. A half a mile away at the deserted marina, boats float noiselessly in the harbor, heavy under snowy blankets. The wind whips over the shore, through the masts, and pulls the clouds down low over everything. But out there on Antelope Island, where you can just imagine the buffalo hunkered down in their giant herds for the winter, the sun is cutting through the dusk…

It feels like it's been winter forever. And while I can handle a strong winter, it's the intermittent sunny days — breaking 50°F at midday, only to plummet hours later into the low 20s, accompanied with freezing rain and snow — that really get me. I'm leaving next week for a trip to the coast, to Los Angeles, a trip that I seem to be making more and more often. Hopefully a little sun will tide me over 'til Utah decides it's done with all this blustery nonsense.