They’re a bit like my children, hummingbirds. We never know how long they will stay, or when they are going to come back. I have made a point to keep my eye on a hummingbird when it comes to the feeder outside the kitchen window; I have taught my children the same, those that will listen, anyway: to take in the fleeting magic until it is gone. It’s a lesson I am still trying to learn. The hummingbird’s time is short, and it is worth one’s complete reverence.
After making fresh nectar in the early summer, I hadn’t given it another thought until just a few days ago when I noticed one of the tiny birds hovering nearby but not stopping to feed. Again, I forgot to refresh the nectar. I have had a lot going on inside my head.
A few days later as I was sorting basil leaves for pesto, a hummingbird brighter green than my garden harvest stopped to take nectar from the neglected feeder. It came back two more times, each time for just a bit longer than before. I felt kind of sad for the bird, because the weeks-old sugar water could certainly not have been what it had hoped for.
Please come back, little bird. I will offer you the freshest nectar, as much as you care to drink.
My adult daughter came to the house as she often does, unannounced, with her boyfriend. I do not discourage this. There were days during the tumult of her high school years where I wondered if she would ever return once she closed the door behind her.
“Ooh! Are you making pesto? Could we come for dinner?” Her eyes had that little sparkle that I loved best.
Though it shouldn’t have, her question caught me by surprise, and I told her that I was leaving town to go to a visitation. Someone would be coming to watch the boys, Dan was taking one boy to baseball practice, and another’s therapist was here, so dinner guests might be hard this time.
“Oh, I think I am going to cook fish tonight.” She was still smiling, no evidence of disappointment detected on her face, even as she was denied the dinner invitation.
Sometime in the string of days that followed, I refilled that feeder with sugar and water and returned it to its spot outside the kitchen window. No one should need an invitation, not even a hummingbird.
On a recent morning which offered a hint of the impending change of season with its crisp breeze, I had a couple hours in the garden, which now seems more of a congested jumble of weeds than the painstakingly planned plot that it once was. It was gratifying and almost effortless to pull ridiculously tall weeds from the rain-soaked earth. The late spring and summer months had brought seemingly endless rainfall with time stolen on the dry in-between days for painting and barn projects, a much anticipated family wedding, summer camps, one child’s surgery, all the regular farm and work chores, and some transitions that were hardly celebratory; all snatched would-be gardening hours and contributed to the wild, unkempt result which now faced me.
My young son wants to be a Boy Scout. Actually, he has been campaigning for this since about first grade, and when the invitation from a friend to accompany him to a meeting came early one morning, he somehow ended up at the Elks Club that night, only to return with an application and yet another skip in his step.
We had a Boy Scout nearly two decades before. I remember a living room full of popcorn, hours spent whittling a wooden car, fingers sore from the lost art of sewing patches, and tents threatened by storms and imaginary bears. Looking back, things could have been much, much worse. The rhythm and expectations had offered a sense of purpose and helped to instill a drive in our older boy that he holds today. Perhaps this will be a good thing for a boundlessly energetic little brother who likely hopes the bears will not be imaginary.
The application was a triplicate form. I filled in the boxes with identifying information but hesitated on the line that asked for my “occupation”. I have been a few different things across the years, but in this moment, the “answer” to what belonged in those boxes eluded me. What was I, anyway?
I don’t want to cry because it’s over. Rather, I would like to celebrate that it happened, and that I was part of it. I would like to rejoice in how it changed me.
This time, the hummingbird stayed for a long while, flitting from one side of the feeder to the other as I held the smallest boy before me on the counter. We watched this moment of magic together, captive by what was clearly the orchestration of a higher power. As it finished feeding, the bird flew off. My little one returned to his toy tractors and I to my breakfast dishes with both of our souls a few drops richer.
There were no wooden pickets to contain my thoughts which rambled as the creeping charlie and the wild carrots inside my garden fence that morning.
Maybe there isn’t a word for my occupation. Maybe there is, though, and maybe it’s the same word that would describe how it feels in those captive seconds while we watch a hummingbird at the feeder.
Something showed itself under a particularly stubborn clump of thatch that had been growing alongside and trying its best to stifle my young blueberry bush. It was just a little plastic tag, an identification marker that had come with the plant when I had first planted it at the farm, when I had chosen it because it bore the name of my son, my faraway scholar, my one-time Scout, my first little boy, my inspiration for all of this…”Elliott” blueberry was stronger than thatch and here to bring me back to what this was all about.
It’s worth the magic. It’s worth the tiny moment in time.
Onward, Scout!