At 3:30 a.m. the cat is asleep in the zinnias. Unable to sleep, myself, I’m taking a flashlight tour of my flower garden and eating a honeycrisp apple. Unseen birds are singing.

Wonder what they do to these apples to keep them so fresh and crisp? Maybe one shouldn’t ask. Friday afternoon I sampled a watermelon from a roadside stand on Highway 50. “Pretty good for this time of year,” the woman selling them said. “Not $8 good,” I thought to myself. Feeling bad after having asked her to cut one, I bought a sack of golden apples, probably picked last fall.

There is a lot of dew on the ground this morning. The red leaves of the banana plant are shiny. We need rain. Earlier in the week a single hummingbird stopped by to sip from salvia blooms. Afterward she landed on a limb about two feet away and preened. Maybe she was dazed from her journey from Central America or southern Mexico where they overwinter.

Some hummingbirds fly nonstop 500 miles across the Gulf, leaving at dusk and traveling for 18-22 hours, I read. They fly just above the water and fishermen and oil rig workers have reported seeing them pass by 200 miles away from land. Wonder what my little visitor’s story is?

No plant evokes the rural South, quite like the catalpa or “fish bait tree.” With its floppy heart-shaped leaves, foot-and-a-half long bean pods and lavish, fragrant blooms, the catalpa is a Valentine from Mother Nature. Friday I stopped to admire several of them growing alongside the shop of M.C. Pate in the curve of Waterworks Road.

Sphinx moths lay eggs on the leaves of the tree; the resulting caterpillars are supposed to be great fish bait. Supposedly you can collect and freeze them until you’re ready to go to the creek. The caterpillars thaw and come back to life.

Friday Jim Coleman, a high school classmate, happened to be filling up his sister Sheila’s car at United Deli. Jim retired from OK Tire about six months ago and says his only obligation now is coaching his 8-year-old grandson’s baseball team in Caledonia. He rattled off places he and his wife Jaynie have or are going to visit, Hawaii, Colorado and another classmate, Danny Shepherd, in Atlanta.

Jim said Caleb Brown, the son of another classmate, Gary (and Becky) Brown is a heck of a shortstop at Caledonia. Even as a sophomore, college scouts are looking at him, according to Jim.

Tuesday night we saw “Second Samuel,” by the Starkville Community Theatre. What a production. You could take Lyle Tate, Kris Lee and Madeline Golden and plunk them down on a Broadway stage and no one would say “what for.” The entire cast was impressive, especially Kendrick Vivians in his SCT debut.

The theater only seats 89 and we got the last two tickets. Bob Anderson, box office man and volunteer extraordinaire, said he had only three tickets left for the entire run of the show. Starkville is fiercely supportive of this little theater — it’s been around since 1976.

Columnist, author and humorist Rheta Grimsley Johnson charmed a crowd of book lovers at the library’s Table Talk Wednesday. After holding forth about her just-published book on Hank Williams, Rheta fielded questions about her reading and music tastes.

Rheta cited Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as her biggest writing influences. After a reluctant pause, she said Eudora Welty was her favorite Mississippi writer (What an impossible question.) and “To Kill a Mockingbird” her all-time favorite book.

“Her heart was shackled to a memory” and “I’m so lonesome I could cry” are her favorite Hank Williams’ lines.

One reason she wrote the book, Rheta said, was to have an excuse to spend a whole lot of time listening to Hank’s music uninterrupted.

She compared Hank to taking calcium supplements. “The older you get the more calcium you need; the older I get the more I find I need Hank,” she said.

Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. E-mail him at [email protected].

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.

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