I grew up on a farm outside Stella, Missouri, with the word “outside” lacking any real meaning since living “outside” Stella wasn’t a whole lot different from living “inside” Stella. You could live “inside” Stella, and your back door would still open onto 120 acres where there was a barn, a dairy cow, two horses, an outbuilding, a chicken coop, a corn crib, and a hog pen. In the words of Dylan Thomas, I “was famous among the barns.” I loved the old red barn and the dirt floor packed and scarred with hoof prints and the smell of hay and the velvety muzzles of our horses and the cows mooing to be milked. I loved the wide doors opening onto our pasture that stretched tufted and matted with fescue to the creek.
Ah, and I loved the summer mornings spent on the creek; a man can’t ask for a better boyhood! I would catch craw dads and fish for crappie, and when my cousins came over, we would swim in a deep hole hidden behind an almost solid curtain of grapevines. The water was clear and cool, and pinpricks of sunlight winked through the trees. We built a fort between the grapevines and the creek and fought off Nazis, Russians, and all other enemies foreign and domestic.
I wouldn’t trade that ramshackle fort tied together with bailing twine and chinked with creek mud for any video game ever invented. Nowadays, kids let somebody else do their imagining for them. But that’s what all old men say.
During the school year, Dad would drive our International to the back of the schoolhouse cafeteria and dump five gallon buckets of table scraps into a rusty drum in the truck bed. Then he would hose out the buckets and turn them upside down, drive back to the farm, and wait for me to come home and help with the chores. Feeding the hogs was actually pretty entertaining. They grunted and squealed and snapped at one another, and I enjoyed the drama. Dad and I would lean against the fence and analyze the character of the hogs: who was the bully and who was the runt, why did some sows eat their own litters, and what should we do with that old boar who’s too tough to eat?
One day toward the end of September, we had slopped the hogs and were watching them sort out who would eat where, when Dad said, “Let’s drive down to the creek. I haven’t been down there in a while.” It was a whim, I guess. An impulse. He climbed in the cab, and I sat on the wheel well in the back of the truck, and off we went, bumping and jostling over the pasture. When we drew closer to the grapevine curtain, I looked and rubbed my eyes and looked again because the leaves seemed to shimmer or ripple, almost like a green waterfall. At first I thought the wind was ruffling the leaves, but I looked at the trees, and they were perfectly still. The shimmer didn’t go away, though. Dad stopped the truck, and we both sat trying to figure it out. Finally, I hopped out and came to his window and asked, “What is it?” and Dad said, “Hummingbirds. Hundreds of hummingbirds.”
He was right. Hummingbirds were whirring and flitting up and down the curtain of leaves: iridescent green and ruby throated with a buzzing blur of wings. No flowers were blooming that time of year, not even the trumpet creepers, so I asked Dad, “What are they doing?”
He said, “Just passing through, I reckon. Migrating south.”
“But why are they here?”
Dad didn’t say anything, and I saw he had tears running down his face. “I don’t know. But look at them!” I went around the truck and climbed in the cab, and we watched the hummingbirds until it got too dark to see them anymore. Dad started the truck and turned on the lights, and we began driving back to the house. We didn’t say anything.
When we pulled up to the back door, Dad turned off the truck, and we sat for a while longer. Then he said, “It’s funny. Sometimes life is hogs and sometime it’s hummingbirds. Most days it’s hogs. But not today.” He paused. “I guess we’re all just trying to get by, but the hummingbirds help.”
“Yes, sir,” was all I could think of to say.
“I love you, son.”
“I love you, too, Dad.”
Dad turned off the truck lights, and we went inside. Mom had supper on the table, and she asked, “Now where have y’all been?”
Dad said, “Julia, we just saw us a miracle. How about saying grace?”
Mom tilted her head and said, “Now, since when are you so mysterious?” Then we held hands, and she said, “Bless us, oh, Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.”