Humming Birds and Jackasses

Reggie had horses. They were ragged, geriatric rescue creatures. They came from various places but formed a clique.

The trio was offset by two bad-tempered, noisy, braying, honking, boisterous, whistling, territorial jackasses; “Lucy” and “Peanut.”

The anti-social jackasses tuned up and charged whatever threatened their territory, such as the cranky neighbor who took his morning coffee just outside the fence.

The memorable thing about Reggie was the number of humming bird feeders he kept: Most were plastic while some were made from canning jars. There must have been three dozen of them.

This time of year hummers are feeding up, adding weight for their short or long migration, depending upon the species.

Refilling feeders was a daily task. He mixed jugs of “bird juice” at night in a ratio of a quarter cup of white sugar to a cup of hot water. He freshened the syrup by dumping third-day leftovers.

It wasn’t cheap. Reggie bought fifty pound bags of sugar at the membership warehouse. Someone turned him in after seeing him load two bags of sugar into his truck.

Early one morning somebody hammered on the front door. They didn’t use the door bell button but laid into the front door like they were mad at it.

They were making such a racket the dogs started barking, which upset the jackasses and they started braying.

They were revenue agents wanting to know what Reggie did with all that sugar. Nobody needed that much sweet tea.

“You’re standing under it,” Reggie told them. They looked up along the edge of the house and into the bushes at the feeders, and the sky was full of hummers.

In the kitchen he showed them the pots for heating water to mix with the sugar. They were not impressed.

Hummers associated people with food, so they welcomed the agents with buzzing low passes.

The revenue department sent out agents short on life experience.

The agents wanted to see the barn, so Reggie freed the latch on the pasture gate and walked them into the barn. Nothing there.

An old chicken house leaned against itself beyond the barn, and the agents wanted to examine that. Reggie warned them that they were entering jackass territory.

They didn’t listen. They wandered into the smaller pasture, the home of Lucy and Peanut.

I don’t know that the agents learned one thing about humming bird juice that morning, but they certainly learned something about jackasses.

joenphillips@yahoo.com