Pssst!
Winter’s over.
I know it’s the 1st of June, but I despise the cold and dark winters. This last winter wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, but there was a very difficult period of snow under a lacquer of ice, under another layer of snow, wrapped in two weeks of below-ten degrees. This is not typical of the Bluegrass, and it’s not good for Lexingtonians, and it’s debilitating, it’s depressing, and certainly not de-lovely for yours truly.
I’ve been fooled before.
I remember the dismay my winemaker friends felt one April, when the temperature plunged to below freezing for a week, and yes, I have seen it snow on Derby Day (quelle horreur!).
Thus, I don’t truly accept that full-fledged summer has arrived until I see a hummingbird.
Yesterday, I saw my first of the year.
<< sigh >>
I love hummers…inordinately.
I think it’s because I don’t remember seeing any growing up. In fact, the first hummingbird I remember seeing was in 1986. Janie and I were visiting Chuck and Julieanne. We were sitting down to breakfast and I gazed out the window to admire their canopy of bougainvillea when a magical tiny critter zipped up to the feeder, that until that moment I had considered purely decorative. Little did I know the true decoration was this mini-pompous bird. Astonished, I quickly mentally revised my animal classifications, moving hummingbirds off the list that included unicorns and snipes.
The glory of the hummingbird…
I wish I had thought of that description.
T. S. Eliot beat me to it. In his 1930 poem “Marina,” he posits;
“Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning death.”
Later, Peter DeVries entitles his 1974 novel; THE GLORY OF THE HUMMINGBIRD.
Eliot and DeVries are seeing this small bird acting like it’s something special and big, when it’s merely special. It hangs, still, in the air. It flies backwards. It wiggles in the air.
It preens.
Like larger birds, it poops whenever and wherever it damn well pleases.
I remember when I would wrinkle my righteous nose when an arm would extend from a car in front of me at a stoplight and flick a depleted cigarette butt out into the street.
I would invariably think; “The world is my ash tray.”
I am heartened by the fact that you rarely witness this heinous act today. I take it as positive proof that we can improve as a species. Maybe we really can make it to Mars.
Today, I watch my much-admired hummers and when they randomly and heedlessly relieve themselves I think; “The world is my commode.”
They probably won’t make it to Mars.
But they made it to summer.
Thank God.
June's Boy 