The Heritage Tour -- Berclair, part 1

The dark clouds seem to jump out from hiding places like mischievous children. Nothing seems to come of them, though thunder occasionally rumbles like those same children trying to be noticed. It's not that it never rains -- plant debris caught in the branches of bushes well-beyond the creeks, and washed out corn rows bear evidence to the contrary, and recently. It's just that so far the skies have threatened more than they have imposed. We have walked the country -- parked the car at one end of the property and surveyed on foot the water tanks and their depth, the feeders and the blinds, the wells and the curious but largely aloof longhorns. The wind blows a constant cool, and the wildflowers -- just beginning to bloom -- delight us first to this patch and then to that one. A few isolated bluebonnets rear their honorific heads; a handful of Indian Paintbrushes offer their salmon-colored blooms, amidst the carpet of yellow and purple and pink blossoms whose names someone more familiar will need to identify.

It is Berclair -- South Texas -- in its emergent spring; mild and sometimes sweater-cool, newly greening and full of buds. We'll not be here long enough for the full exhibition, but the foretaste is a delight to savor.

So far I have remembered my way around -- the lanes and the locks, the country roads and cattle gates, the nearby grocery store and the planted fields in which I take particular interest. And the memories -- some simple images; others narrative tales -- begin to emerge, like films retrieved from a back closet and threaded onto mental reels. People. Relations. Events. Tales. Smells and tastes and injuries and exhilarations. Dominoes in the gas station, Sunday School at the church, watermelon on the front porch, and stories -- a steady breeze of rocking chair and porch swing stories -- late into the night. Fireflies and horned toads and jackrabbits and coyotes; that special pomegranate bush and the cattle answering Grandad's car horn.

Rocking here on this afternoon's front porch, the steady wind keeping the afternoon heat at bay, I'm both then and now, and strangely grateful for them both.