The tiny
bird's green tinge was pronounced. I've recently been told what this meant: a
female. Ah, so I may properly use the pronoun "she" for this
fast-moving, tensely concentrating, all-business creature that manages the
business of survival in a subcompact bird-size. Has there ever been another
feathered animal nearly this small?
She plied
her trade in the most systematic way imaginable. Something attracted her
interest to a patch of plants growing close to the patio pavement where I stood
enjoying the late morning sun in a universe of light -- a better place than
we ordinarily inhabit, a better place than human beings will ever achieve on our own, and
yet it opens its gate, day after day, for those of us willing to stick our head
inside and look... But whatever drew her close lost out at once to a pair of flowering
"anise hyssop" plants I wedged into an otherwise busy spot that turned green in late summer, their blossom days mostly gone, in my ceaseless
appetite to produce more late summer color. As far as the anise hyssop is
concerned, it's still summer. Besides, this is one of those Septembers that if
not exactly endless summer all the way through (night temps dropping to the
forties) most of us would wish to last forever.
It hasn't been a 'saying-goodbye, back to school' month. It's been more of a 'here-forever' sense-surround month.
It's a month of identical dream-like, light-filled days.
The
hummingbird harvested the anise hyssop blossoms (plant photo, top left ) as
methodically as a human being, say, would pick berries. It probed and drove her
proboscis into each of the funnel-shaped violet blossoms, darting quickly from
one to another, from stem to stern so to speak, leaving one thoroughly explored clutch for the next:
Here was a bird in a hurry. One gets the impression that the hummingbird is
always a bird in a hurry. Maybe a
species of this size feels it's just not safe to linger exposed to view, backlighted by the attractions of a colorful world of flowers. A bird that loves color, but knows beauty
is dangerous. It's just not safe to linger and, so to speak, smell the flowers.
You don't
smell them when they're lunch. When your flowers are your food. And you are
gathering your nectar where you may.
As I
watched I kept thinking that the bird would give me the eye, demand "what
are you doing there?" in a startled tone, and beat a hasty removal. But it did not see me. I
was a shadow. A vertical sort of presence, a conical shrub maybe, still rather
than moving. Happily, I am good at still. The hummingbird worked up one plant
and down another, darted back, back-pedaled so to speak in that copterish
hovering way of theirs, to make sure she hadn't missed anything. Then checked
out the heart of a neighboring plant, a buccaneer plant with blue flowers, but
not the right kind apparently, found nothing to interest her there, and darted
away to the other end of the garden where, unfortunately, no late-summer
abundance of blossoms existed to hold her.
Why does
the bird hunt and gather and explore so thoroughly? Was she as hungry as she looked? Is she
storing up calories (it is hard to say "fattening up" for so tiny a
creature) in preparation for a long trip. I have been told, though it is hard
to credit, that hummingbirds migrate long distances.
Afterwards, I was
tempted to go to the garden center and stock up on anise hyssop.
Every mind longs
for beauty. The more the creatures that grow or fly, made of earth or feathers,
become themselves, reveal their souls to us, the more we long for them.
They are
all our flowers. I bend toward them, in spirit.
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