A month of extraordinary heat and lack of rain has done what legions of mockingbirds and dozens of passing pedestrians and neighbors over time could not — put the huge fig tree at the lot’s corner out of business.

Way back when, enterprising people apparently decided figs were the economic future in this part of the world.

Consequently, there are an inordinate number of very large fig trees, usually loaded in early August with their dark, sweet fruit.

(Okay, so the fig is not technically a fruit, but I dropped Dr. Connell’s botany class long before we got to the why. So be it. )

Under many of the trees there are mockingbirds, so bloated from their feeding frenzies that they waddle around like those birds with no wings.

Fig trees have an early season, bearing some fruit in June, then return in August with the main money crop.

One June, when there was no hint of what was to come, fruit-wise, I decided to try my hand at doing something with figs given me by a well-meaning neighbor.

Unwilling to venture into preserves, jams or jellies, I followed a stove-top recipe, creating a syrup from sugar and water, blending in some figs and freezing the concoction.

I left the pan in the sink overnight and ended up with what was probably the world’s first fig taffy.

Later, we tried some of the syrupy stuff on Blue Bell homemade vanilla. Not bad. Of course the ice cream makes almost anything better.

But now I’m sticking to Fig Newtons.

(Okay, I know they are actually fig rolls. But Fig Newtons is what Nabisco markets them as and what Dad called them in every fishing or hunting day lunch bag we ever packed, then ate well before the sun got very high. That’s good enough for me.)

Jim Butler, a Bolton High School alumnus, was an acclaimed writer and editor at the Alexandria Town Talk for 36 years, the last 23 (1977-2003) as editor-in-chief. He led Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina for the Gulfport (Miss.) Sun-Herald in 2005. Butler returned home to Cenla a few years ago, and shares his talents and insight with Rapides Parish Journal readers.