There’s a summer edition of the Batesville Magazine that will soon be available. Now it’s mostly waiting on me and one last story — the story about the Buddhist monastery out on Red Hill.

I visited last Tuesday after another story idea for the magazine failed to materialize. I first spoke with Sister Boi Nghiem by phone and explained the approaching deadline. She was gracious enough to invite me on short notice.

The 30 or so monks and nuns who live at the monastery year ‘round are Vietnamese Buddhists. I spent several hours enjoying the surroundings and the company of Sister Boi and also Sister Can Nghiem, who carefully explained what they are trying to do on the 120 acres that their predecessors bought on rolling Panola hills.

They gave me a tour, allowed me to share their communal noon meal and steered me through the protocol expected of visitors.

All that will be included in the story in the coming magazine. I hope you find it as interesting as I found the people of the Magnolia Grove Monastery.

There’s one story, however, that won’t be included in the magazine version — about my faux pas in an encounter with a wasp.

The people at the monastery are vegan and try to avoid doing anything that would harm any living creature. They also remove their shoes when they enter any of the buildings on the grounds.

So when Sister Boi and I, accompanied by another sister, prepared to enter the book room, we dutifully removed our shoes. A short distance inside the door, there crawled a black wasp along the floor. Wasp-sting stories have been abundant this spring with most include some comment about the wasps acting meaner or madder than in years past.

Under most circumstances, my reaction to a wasp on the floor is to crush him immediately underfoot, but I thought better of it having already removed my shoes. I had stepped back over the threshold, picked up my shoe and turned smash the critter, when the sister quickly bent down and grabbed the tip of the wasp’s wing and deftly flicked him outside, out of harm’s way. Only then did it dawn on me that my shoe-in-hand response had prompted her to move the wasp from harm’s way with her bare hand. Oops.

“She’s probably never been stung before,” Sister Boi observed.