It had been raining
torrentially, days too cold for Texas in May.
One morning, there were
ducks in the yard. Not out back in one of the newly sprung ponds, but out front
in the middle of the spongy expanse of St Augustine. Two young, beautiful Mallards,
perhaps a mating pair, bathing. My own lady birds watched casually from the
front window, no particular interest in things with feathers. I stopped to
admire with them.
After years of drought and
water conservation, even our lakes are overfull, spillways Rubenesque; the
Trinity has breached its banks in the middle of a concrete city, a beautiful
exodus daring man to encroach, and the dam at Bastrop broke, the lake emptying.
It was far enough from Houston that only land was hurt, but ominous to see the
bottom of a lake once full.
June finally arrived. We
finally got sun last week but the heat came with it, and suddenly it’s an
overbearing 95 and my hands burn on the wheel on the drive home. Heat. I recall
huge cracks in the dark black gumbo we called land in the '70s growing up. It'll be a summer like that.
Perhaps we’ve grown apart,
my first love, the Texas heat and I. Perhaps I'm realizing I'm a woman full
grown and some physical labor, though still good and right in my mind, over the
years, has become somewhat beyond me. Definitely though, it’s the love bites
from the Mosquitoes that adore me, leaving me low, and slightly fevered.
Though not as low as those
dark days of torrential rain.
