Bay magnolias and lightning bugs

Opinion

May 31, 2012

Bay magnolias and lightning bugs

By Robert Hitt Neil, Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Thu May 31, 2012, 09:43 AM CDT

PICAYUNE — Betsy announced one recent evening that she wanted me to grill some chicken breasts while smoking (on the grill) chopped-up vegetables in balsamic vinegar and other more secret ingredients. I therefore hied me out to the patio to follow her instructions. It is wonderful to be married to a lady who knows and respects the talents of her man as a cook. I specialize in Slung Coffee inside, and grilling outside, and have won awards that testify to my mastery at the latter. I cranked off a charcoal fire, collected my sassafras sticks for adding before the food went on, and sat down at the patio table in the gathering dusk to await that moment when the outside coals begin to turn grayish.

The bay magnolia tree over me was in full bloom.

My concept of Heaven — and I have made plans to go there, which I will share with you if you’ll call — is a hammock slung between a bay magnolia and a gardenia bush (in Heaven, those grow tall and strong enough to hold a hammock) next to a cypress-beam structure abuzz with bumblebees — not the mean old ground bumblebees, now; they ain’t gonna make the trip — while a good-looking Angel (got her picked out, too) brings me a glass of mint tea once in a while, and maybe a slab of muscadine pie in the evening.

With the cypress Store (our guesthouse across the patio; the old plantation commissary) providing the bumblebee music, I closed my eyes and just inhaled the odor of those miniature magnolia blossoms – sweeter than any regular magnolia ever thought about being. I could hear my Designated Angel banging around in the kitchen behind me, undoubtedly preparing to bring me my mint tea. I opened my eyes to glance toward the fire, and was rewarded by a flash of light.

But it wasn’t fire from the grill I was seeing — and then another flash, and another, and another — it was lightning bug flashes, as the little bugs began their silent sight symphony, coming from the Mammy Grudge ditchbank! I sat and marveled at their beauty.

Yes. Before you ask it, it was a little too early in the year for the mosquitoes. I was in shorts and tee shirt, barefooted.

When I was little, before the Guv’mint outlawed DDT and the stuff that used to kill mosquitoes, we chullen could play outside at night in the rural Delta. Betsy was raised in the small town of Lexington, and she says the kids used to follow the “Bug Truck” sprayer on their bicycles. Oh, well: Big Brother surely knows best.

I’ve written this before, but one of the first real Gifts I ever remember was when I was about five years old and low sick with a bad spell of either whooping cough, or malaria (yeah, yeah, I know) and Big Dave and Miss Nena brought Little Dave out to Brownspur to cheer me up. He came into my room with a whole quart jar full of lightning bugs! There was a little grass in the bottom, and holes were punched in the top. Big Robert cut off my room lights, and when those bugs got cranked off, we could durn near read by their illumination!

It may have been whooping cough, because it seems like later on during the night I started coughing, and the nighttime remedy for that was a level tablespoon of sugar soaked with coal-oil. I guarantee that after being dosed with that, a kid did NOT dare cough again until dawn, when Daddy was out of the house!

Yet I remember lying awake in the dark — still no night lights here — and watching those lightning bugs crawling around, flitting from side to side, just sitting in the grass, or clinging to the top holes, and marveling at the light those little bugs gave off. I’ve never forgotten that Gift, and recall later in life going out myself to catch a quart to lighting bugs, just to see how long Little Dave worked to bring me that Gift. I figure lightning bugs will be in Heaven. Mosquitoes will not. Book of Bob, if you care to check your own Bible. I disremember chapter and verse. The grilled chicken and vegetables were Heavenly, my Angel said.

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