Why Women Rule the World

If I said the word “summer”, and then said the word “thundershower”, would you understand the difference? Do you know the smell of hot concrete in the rain, and how gratifying it can be because of what it means?

It does not rain in this country in the summertime. June, July, and August are what people in the oil patch used to call “waterhauls”. You can go months at a time in Oklahoma and not see a drop. Not one. 

In that country, Little Dixie, and in that time, the 1950’s, my grandparents began thinking of river trips, trotlines waded knee deep to waist high, baited with crawdads seined from a pond; hand-cranked ice cream on the porch in the dark, heat lightning in the distance. Hot, hot summertime.

Air conditioning? Jeeminy Christmas. “Swamp coolers” if you were lucky; those that melted the hard candy into amorphous lumps on the coffee table and wrinkled the pages there in the family Bible. The best place in the country was right there on the front porch in the dark; not cool, but less hot, tons of small talk; long spaces of total silence, watching the heat lightning, and conjuring the cosmos.

In that time there was no ambient light. There were no large cities to produce it, not even OKC, far off though it was. We saw the Milky Way every night in the summertime.

If you had a pipe, you smoked it, stuffed full of aromatic Prince Albert in a can. If you were female, you maybe snuck a can of Copenhagen out of your apron pocket and sneaked a pinch there in the dark, the sweet smell of it coming to me even now over the years. If you were a boy, you sat there in the dark, listening to the stories, watching the heat lightning, wondering, wondering, wondering.

A hot, summertime shower came to us out here on the Branch one evening last week. For about fifteen minutes, no more, it rained hard enough to “strangle a toad” as Aunt Gertrude used to say down yonder. Pam and the Grandkids were gone, off to a ballgame, maybe. Me, home alone, as it were.

Once I was sure it was an actual rain, not imaginary, I poured a glass of iced tea, picked a leaf of mint for it just outside the back door, and moved out onto the front porch to watch. It began to rain even harder. Like a cow peein’ on a flat rock Uncle Bill would’ve said and did one time down yonder. I remember. Too much, maybe.

There are lots of benches on my front porch. People need a place out of the heat and rain to sit. A place in the shade. So do ghosts. As the rain came down even harder, ghosts began moving up out of it to sit all around me on the porch.

Pam re-filled the hummingbird feeders the other day. Incredibly, they continued to come to the feeder even in the downpour. No other bird life moved, but the hummers did. Earlier in the day, the grandkids, the littlest ones, had asked to sit on the porch to watch them. To me, anything more fascinating to them than electronics is a huge plus with me.

We fish all summer, cane poles and worms. Perch, out the youthful wazoo. Sometimes we watch hummingbirds.

There were three at the feeder in the driving rain the other day: One dusky female, and two dandied-up males, all rubies and metallic greens. Hucksters, jivers, fair weather friends. Front runners, only.

Only the female continuously hit the feeder, storm or no storm. The males would weasel-out as the rain sluiced heavier, and huddle under the protective canopy of a white oak growing ten yards away waiting, perhaps, for a more opportune moment; watching, sullenly, a female without fear.

Women rule the world, storm or no storm. No boy, warrior, dying on a faraway field, ever called out for his daddy.

Right before it quit, it rained the hardest. No doubt it was putting new freshets, and bait, into new places all over the lake. Catfish move in the rain. There would be catfish moving tonight, and tomorrow, and I would be moving after them.

Right now, I was going to sit, drink iced mint tea, and watch a swarm of hummingbirds hit the feeder, led by a tiny, dusky female.

If I said the word “summer”, and then said “hummingbird”, would you understand the difference?

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen