“August Cannas”
The last month of summer is here and it is hot. The flowers are just about all gone except the cannas—bless their hearts—they just keep on blooming. I found these cannas in a neighbor’s yard down the street towards the creek. I have been watching them for some time now and the other day I ventured up into their yard with my camera and I got some great pictures.
I had planned on doing a painting of roses for my next painting, but when I saw the pictures of these cannas, I changed my mind and did some cannas again. I hope you don’t mind.
On these hot days and nights, I am so grateful to have an air-conditioned home to live in. When I was growing up, nobody had an air-conditioned home. I was thinking about those days when doing this painting. One of the hottest summers I recall, was the one where I spent most of the summer on a sheep ranch up north of Rocksprings on the road towards Sonora, Texas.
A widower, with a son about my age, married a young woman who lived with my family. After their marriage, they invited me to spend the summer with them on his sheep ranch. I didn’t realize just why I got this invitation until much later until I was grown up and learned what married folks do. That is when I figured out that my real job was to keep his son occupied while they “honeymooned.”
The ranch house was about three rooms with a screened-in porch. On that rocky land there were no shade trees of any size. There was no electricity service on that remote ranch; consequently, there were no lights, refrigerators, radio, or any of the electrical appliances that we are so used to today. And, believe me, it was hot, hot, hot.
On the ranch, we started each day when there was enough light to see by rounding up the sheep in one of the pastures to put them into a pen near the ranch house. The purpose was to check the flock to see if any of the sheep had “worms.” This was in the days before the screw worm flies in Texas had been eradicated.
These flies laid their eggs in any wound or cut on an animal. The fly eggs hatched into larva, what we called “worms,” and the larva would start eating the animal. As the wound became infected with worms and got larger, it attracted more flies. That’s how we could identify the sheep that had worms: by the swarms of flies around it.
The sheep that had worms were put in another pen to be treated with worm medicine until they were either well or had died. The worm medicine had an unpleasant odor that seemed to penetrate my skin. After about a week there, I smelled like that medicine. This is what we did from daylight until noon everyday.
After the noon-time meal, the newly married couple wanted to take a “nap.” So to get us boys out of the house and occupied, he would pay us a penny for each fly we killed down near the barns and pens. Off we would go with our fly-swatters to the barn and a bucket each to keep the flies in that we had killed so they could be counted after their “nap.” We had instructions not to come back to the house until he called us. After their nap, we would all go swimming in the big concrete water tank that was filled with water by a windmill to get some relief from the heat.
We went to town, Rocksprings, once a week on Saturdays to get groceries and large blocks of ice to take back to the ranch to use to keep the perishable food cool. The other boy and I would take the money we made killing flies and go to the drug store and get a chocolate malt milkshake. I can still remember the anticipation I had while watching the drug store clerk making for us those delicious ice cold wonderfully sweet milkshakes.
Many years later, I had the occasion to visit Rocksprings, and I was saddened to see that drug store out of business and boarded up. One of the hard things for me to accept in life is that nothing lasts forever.
Cheers,
Acree
<< Back to Email
Archive Page >>
|
