Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

Women are agents of creation and the function of the Man is to protect the Woman and facilitate her efforts.  I saw this portrayed recently in the movie “The End of Oak Street.”  The male lead in that movie at one point is eaten by a dinosaur.  This slows down the beast long enough for his wife and the children to escape.

He was at his height of usefulness at that point, as he was being digested by a tyrannosaurus rex. 

But this isn’t a column about that movie.  It’s a column about…well…I will let you figure it out.

I am married to a butterfly woman. 

She keeps an eye on the butterflies that come through our yard–Monarchs, in particular–and watches where they alight on plants.  She then looks for the leaves of the plants where they lay their eggs.  She will take the leaves and put them in a jar so they can hatch into caterpillars.  When they do, she goes out into the yard and gathers milkweed to feed them.

Because of this, I purposefully avoid mowing down milkweed.  This needs to be understood within the proper context.  Weeds constitute a large proportion of my lawn.  I miss a lot of them when I mow.  The milkweeds I avoid on purpose.

She raises the caterpillars until they form a chrysalis.  When they do, she gives them either to the school or the library.  She’s done this for years.  I’ve written about it before.

Because of this or whatever other mystical means, she has become known among the cabal of butterfly women in town. (There has to be a better word to use here than cabal.)

I wrote above about milkweed, as it is a favorite food of the Monarch butterfly.  There are other butterflies, each of which has its own favorite food.

Let us speak now of the Zebra Swallowtail.

The Zebra Swallowtail likes the leaves of the paw paw tree.  

Yes, the paw paw is a fruit native to North America which is famous because of the song people of my age were taught in school. The song is called “Way down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch.”  It might actually be about hunting for paw paws, though everything Freud said makes me suspicious.

In any case, I say all this so I can say I was approached by a friend at Rotary with an offer.  I keep his name confidential because what happens at Rotary, stays at Rotary.

My confidential Rotary friend came to me with an offer of paw paw plants.  His wife is a butterfly woman too.  She would like to attract more Zebra Swallowtails to the area.  There is a plan for this and that plan is the proliferation of paw paw plants.

Would my wife and I like some, he asked.

My wife said yes and that began our life as paw paw farmers.  The first stage was a clandestine meeting in the PSU Foundation parking lot where we exchanged the first four saplings.  After a year or two, we met in the same place and exchanged four more.  It turns out you have to have a couple of different varieties if you want to raise paw paws. You have to have paw paws if you want to plant more plants and make the paw paw proliferate.

These varieties have names.  My fellow Rotarian has told me.  It didn’t stick.

I have two rows of paw paw trees planted in my back yard now.  Everything was great, until it stopped raining.

It stopped raining and the temperature has been hovering near 100 degrees from one side or the other for a while now.

I looked at my paw paw orchard.  They didn’t look vibrant, and one in particular looked pretty bad.

I bought buckets and started to carry water.  The one that looked sick got sicker, so I weeded around it, pulling up even a milkweed plant that had taken root near it.

The leaves looked yellow and some had fallen off.

I watered it and came back the next day.  They had all fallen off.  It stood there, a naked twig sticking out of the ground.  I consulted with my Rotarian friend.

“Should I continue to water?”

“Yes!”

So I did.  After school restarted, I began to get up early so I could water before I went off to work. I’m out there every morning, gathering the night’s production of spiderwebs on my face as I walk in the quarter-light to paw paws, being very careful not to accidentally step on them.

Then, one morning, I thought I saw something stick out from the naked twig.  I came back when it was lighter.  

A tiny leaf.

The leaf has grown and has been joined by others.

We will have paw paws to throw at the cars.  There will be a Zebra Swallowtail in the grill of each one of those cars.

Way down yonder in the paw paw patch.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com. He invites you to visit the blog and to subscribe.