For those of you in the throes of winter, I offer a memory of summer:
Even at 8,500’, the day promised to be warm. Locusts droned from the meadow grasses, cicadas from the piñons. After a pre-dawn rain, the sky had cleared. A sea of golden flowers gave ray for ray back to the sun; among the sagebrush, scarlet gilia burned. Fragrance rose like smoke from the junipers as their resin warmed.
I had paused mid-morning to write down some impressions of the last few days. Without the pause, I was finding, time passed in a blur. No bright thread wove the days together into a larger purpose, into a story or even a word I could speak with my life.
The van’s sliding door was open to the breeze. Flies flew in, flew around, flew to the back windows and flung themselves again and again at the glass. (Why can a fly not just leave?) Occasionally I would stop writing to open the back doors to let them escape, but they would not go. With a mile of sky around them, they buzzed against the glass. Eventually, using my fly swatter like a scoop, I would shoo them toward freedom, whether they wanted it or not.
Puffy clouds—the kind that “wouldn’t hurt a soul”—began to rise on the thermals. A raven called, the locusts buzzed. I drank tea and made notes in daydreamy solitude.
Mid-sentence, a bright flash of movement zipped through the sliding door. A hummingbird hovered for the time it took me to gasp, then flew to the back doors, lost. She flung herself again and again against the glass to escape, her wings beating against the windows. I leaped outside to open the doors, but even once they were flung wide, the bird would not go. She was too focused on the glass to sense that freedom lay elsewhere. Her perceptions trapped her.
I can still hear her wingbeats, see the light on her iridescent, emerald back, still see the sun shining through her wingtips when she perched, wings splayed against the glass, on the bottom of the frame and paused in…exhaustion? Despair? For a few seconds’ heartbeats she stayed there—a handful of mine, a hundred of her own—and in that pause she looked around the window instead of through it. A heartbeat later, she was free.
I was not aware of “living the moment” at the time. The distress of a tiny creature cried out too intensely for anything but care. But that same intensity etched the moment in memory (the bright eye, the whirring wing, the translucent feathers, the pause). Only later did I stop to look around, to wonder.
To sense the honor of our kinship.
The Stories of Trees 