There was a beekeeper named Tamsin whose entire hillside of wildflowers burned to black stubble one dry summer, taking with it every hive she'd spent a decade building.
She walked the scorched field the next morning, not looking for anything in particular, just walking, the ash still warm enough in places to feel through her boots. A neighbor found her out there and, meaning well, said the kind of thing neighbors say in such moments — that everything happens for a reason, that the land would be richer for the burning, that some good would surely come of it in time.
Tamsin shook her head slowly. "The fire didn't have a reason," she said. "It didn't check whether I deserved it or whether some lesson needed teaching. It just burned because the conditions were right for burning, and my hill happened to be standing in the way of that. I'd rather just say that plainly than dress it up as meaning something it doesn't."
"Doesn't that make it harder to bear?" the neighbor asked. "Believing it's just random?"
"No," said Tamsin. "Strangely, it makes it easier. If the fire had a reason, I'd have to go looking for what I did to deserve it. Since it didn't, I just get to start over without that extra weight."
She rebuilt that autumn — new hives, new frames, planted new seed into the blackened soil before the first frost, working alongside the same indifferent weather that had taken everything from her months before. People in town remarked on how quickly she seemed to recover, as though grief were a debt she'd somehow paid off ahead of schedule.
"I didn't recover quickly," Tamsin told them, when they asked. "I just decided early on not to wait for the burning to make sense before I started building again. The two things don't actually depend on each other. Understanding why it happened and deciding to keep going — those are different jobs, and only one of them was ever really mine to finish."
By the following summer the hillside was green again, scarred in patches where nothing had quite grown back yet, the new hives humming steadily beside the old foundations. Tamsin tended both halves of the field the same way — the recovered and the still-recovering — without needing either one to explain itself to her first.
