Gift from Vermont

Dawn, our AirBnB host from Vermont, called me a few weeks ago to ask if the kids would be interested in studying a beautiful, massive wasp’s nest she had just cut off her house at the end of the season. Back in July, when we visited Jason (<- I finally posted those pictures as well), the kids had found a small scrap of wasp nest ‘paper mache‘ in Dawn’s garden, and she remembered how fascinated they had been. What a quirky, lovely offer … of course I said yes! At first, we thought about the best way to mail the fragile structure, but then it turned out that she was about to visit family in Brooklyn over Thanksgiving, literally a couple of blocks from our house, so she hand delivered the sculpture to us. The nest is amazing: about the size of a football, with a complex maze of layers, but weighs only a few ounces. This particular one shows the inner layers exposed, as it had to be cut out of a corner. After a few days of studying, we donated it to the science collection of our kids’ elementary school – both science teachers were thrilled!