June Into July
There he is again, above me, half-watching me as I am half-watching him.
As I write this, the hummingbird is on the telephone wire over my head, his tiny feet curled around the wire, his baton of a bill moving left and right, conducting the orchestra only he and his kin can hear. The summer day is hot and still, and much quieter than the summer Sundays of my youth, the sultry days down in the Delta when the reedy drone of locusts and katydids stretched across the hours and surprised you at night when it began to fade. Quieter here, yes, and perhaps not as hot, but hot still. When I passed the neighbor’s stock pond earlier, some of the cows were standing in the water to get cool. One of them, a calf, was submerged completely except for the top half of his head, appearing like a ruminant alligator, his ping-pong paddle ears moving back and forth, his eyes looking up into the great sky with something like pleasure in their inky depths. On the south side of the house the Rose of Sharon is blooming, looking like the largest okra plant in the world, and the okra is blooming in the kitchen garden, looking like the tiniest hibiscus on the planet, and we have no hibiscus on our smallholding, but if we did, it would look like a small Rose of Sharon, and my observations would loop back on themselves like the months that return as we hurtle around the sun, which is hurtling around the galaxy, which is hurtling around the universe, which is sometimes contained within the water-ring made by my water glass on this glass-topped table. And here we sit, hummingbird and man, on this expanse of warm green, the very expanse of stony but fertile soil where, two hundred and forty-six years ago, Daniel Boone’s sixteen year-old son James was massacred (along with the supply party he was leading) by Cherokee and Shawnee warriors. And who is to say whether or not an intense and territorial warrior knelt right here where I am sitting and nocked an arrow or steadied his breathing or gripped his war-club before making the charge that would spill more blood down into the Adam-birthing ground?
A squadron of barn swallows overhead on one of their summer sorties makes a sound like a keen, green switch when a fed-up mother slashes it rapidly back and forth in the air. But the backs of my legs sting when that sound conjures up long-ago punishments for me tormenting my own mother, so I will change the subject and send heavenward, up past the barn swallows, a breath of gratitude for my sister making it successfully through her surgery. I know of such things because she and I have recently reconnected after a half-century of being lost to each other, and perhaps someday I will tell on these electronic pages the story of how that happened. For now, I will just look at a photo she sent me. I see in her face my own expression. All my life, I’ve been told that when I am listening intently to another person, the force of my gaze makes the listener uncomfortable. In this scanned version of a picture of my sister, I see that same tightened-down focus. The Orr gaze. There it is.
But I am brought back to myself by the song of the Carolina wren standing on the fence post near me. The lilting song is gorgeous, and the sheer volume of her voice is forever astonishing. In the bird world, she probably returns half of the things she purchases and regularly demands to see the manager. These things can be deduced and inferred simply by watching, if one has an eye and an ear for such things, and I have all the senses under the stars when it comes to the little creatures that move in and out of my notice.
Last night, I crept to the door and shined a light out at where the possums feed, and there they were. I had put out some overripe bananas for them, and I had to stifle my own laughter while watching them eat, their pointed snouts bobbing as their jaws worked the mushy fruit, their well-toothed faces looking like toothless old men with mouthfuls of peanut butter. Smiling in the dark room through my own dubious teeth, I hope to someday be indentured myself…
The air lacks the deep South’s roar of the insects, yet today this mountain air is ringing with birdsong, and it certainly is not wanting any of the smoke-ish, impenetrable haze. The humidity is hung with the pollen particles, and my poor wife is suffering today, with no over-the-counter remedy helping her yet. The bees and wasps are sluggish in their pathways through the heavy air, and the tardy junebugs startle me with their loud and abrupt buzzing as they whip just past my head, fornicating little pests that they are. The birdbath is full and undisturbed, and this puzzles me, because if I were a cardinal or an amused nuthatch (I know this because one of them is laughing at me even now from the maple tree’s shelter), I would take up residence at the birdbath until sundown. But for now, the concrete bowl is a calm pond, it’s surface dotted with pollen and — just now –exactly one pine needle. And June moves into July just like that, with a quiet and slender plip in the expanse of anticipation that I call the afternoon air.
~ S.K. Orr
