Tag: hummingbirds

Late August

I’ve always loved this time of year. Every wild thing that grows, the trees, the grass, the flowers swaying along the roadsides are at their largest and most verdant, having fulfilled the promise the seeds they emerged from held. Even the air feels alive. The electric hum of crickets, the crystalline tweets of goldfinches as they harvest seeds from spent blossoms, the music of late summer is everywhere you go.

The farm stands are overflowing with good things: corn and peaches and peppers and beautiful round melons still holding onto the warmth of the sun. Bouquets of zinnias—hot pink and orange and red—sit in aluminum pails of water, patiently waiting for someone to take them home.

Meadows spin with butterflies and grasshoppers. Dragonflies rest their jeweled wings on fenceposts. Once in a while, I spot a hummingbird, so quick and tiny it doesn’t seem quite real.

The days are still warm, but the nights are cool again—such a relief after months of relentless heat. I’m starting to feeling like my old self, sleeping better than I have since May. My dreams are as clear and bright as the stars.

But the magic is fleeting. Soon, it will be gone, replaced by autumn’s acorns and falling leaves and dry, rustling grass. Go out into it while you can. You won’t have to go far. Take a deep breath and let the glamour seep into your bones, so you’ll still have it with you when the snow flies.

ENP

Everyday Magic

Back in the early summer, I went for a hike at the state forest near my house. I’ve been there many times, during every season, and I know the woodland pretty well. Along my regular route, there’s a side trail that leads to a ledge overlooking a pond. I don’t always visit the ledge, but this day I did. The first thing I noticed was a pile of what looked like white balloon skins. After looking more closely, I discovered a few more piles, all of them beside shallow holes dug into the sandy soil. Then it dawned on me: turtles! I had come across a nursery where mother turtles had laid their eggs in the spring. The baby turtles had recently hatched, leaving their egg casings behind.

It was amazing to me that I’d been to that exact spot so many times and had never noticed how alive it was.

Magic is everywhere if you’re open to seeing it. Sometimes it’s in the way the sun reflects off my birdbath, creating a dancing globe of light on the tree behind it. It’s in the miniature green bees that visit my garden, the pollinating insects almost too small for me to see without my glasses. There’s magic in a toddler’s smile, and in the look of delight on their face when you smile back.

A couple of weeks before I discovered the turtle hatchery, I was with a friend at the same state forest by the same pond, but in a different spot. My friend pointed to an oak limb stretching out over the water. “Look at that bird,” he said. “It’s huge.” An adult barred owl was perched on the branch, its eyes trained on the pond. As we stood and watched, the owl swooped down and grabbed something just below the surface with its talons and flew up into the canopy, never making a sound.

Just yesterday, I was on the porch at Mount Holyoke’s Summit House, a 19th century hotel in Hadley, Massachusetts, that is today a museum and visitors center. Looking down at a flower bed below where I was standing, I spotted a tiny iridescent green bird bouncing from blossom to blossom. The hummingbird made several trips to the flowers, stopping occasionally to rest on top of a nearby fence. Several people walked right past the little jewel, most of them much closer to the bird than I was, but they were all too preoccupied to notice him. On the hummer’s final trip between the flowerbed and the fence, he flew up to the spot where I was standing and landed briefly on the railing beside me. It was as if he knew I’d been watching him.

If you’re quiet and pay close attention to your surroundings, there’s almost no limit to the magical things you can find. I used to think I needed to travel the world to find inspiring, wonderful things to help mitigate life’s hardships and disappointments, and help me come up with ideas for my writing, but that’s not the case at all. Everything I need is wherever I happen to be.

ENP