Skimmer bugs and Aunt Sukey

It’s late Spring in Four Holes Swamp. Noseum season has passed. The skimmer bugs have hatched, and the horseflies are hunting someone to bite who doesn’t have a wet towel on their head. Skeeters are flying in the early morning, late morning, early afternoon, and evening. This is why everyone in Four Holes sits on a screened porch with a ceiling fan whirring to help against the heat and humidity that rises to 100 degrees and 100 percent—unusual in late May but not unheard of. The swamp is a buggy place and folks there know summer begins by the bug population, not by the calendar.

But let’s get back to those skimmer bugs. Usually, but not always, sometime in their early life cycle is when Junior’s Great Aunt Sukey comes to visit. She grew up in Four Holes but doesn’t live here. She married into the Williams clan four counties removed, closer to the Upstate. This means she lost her accent and her waistline, but not her wisdom. She’s known to have an opinion but does not express it unless there is some measure of wisdom to share. When her eyes meet yours, her brow furrows, and her head tilts, you know something is coming from her brain you can hold onto.

Who would imagine skimmer bugs and a wise saying could ever share the same sentence, but Aunt Sukey possesses a singular ability to tie together dissimilar things. Maybe this is where Junior learned to respond to peculiar notions by saying, “Really.”

Growing up around his aunt, he was often dumbfounded by what came from her mouth and all he could come up with in conversation is “really.”  The response as a boy meant he didn’t know much, but as an adult, it meant he knew a lot and the person to whom he said it didn’t know much at all. As Sukey would always say after telling Junior something, “A word to the wise should be sufficient.”

Really?

A screened porch is the room less formal for Southerners, where bonds are formed wiping your forehead with glasses filled with ice tea or lemonade and saying, “Whew, it’s hot,” and sipping in between. Discussion gets livelier churning peach ice cream on the outside steps or eating pound cake, or better, the two together while the ceiling fan is on high. Sometimes the talk is about Cousin Ben’s squirrel huntin’, but other times, after everyone’s stomach has settled, the conversation can lean a bit serious. This is where Aunt Sukey shines and the skimmer bugs come in.

In that quiet moment when conversations make a turn, Junior decided to raise a concern that had been weighing on him. He said, “I wonder how some Christians don’t take their faith as serious as other Christian folk.” Well, Aunt Sukey’s brows furrowed and her head tilted.

She said, “Well, it’s like the swamp and its critters. You have skimmer bugs that always live on the surface, and you have Kingfishers that dive for food. One day those skimmers will begin to feed like Kingfishers.”

Really?