Chickadee

Yesterday, on a bright, white hillside, in a grove of maples, I heard the black-capped chickadee’s breeding song:  two (sometimes three) thin notes, one high, one low.  The night before, knowing the forecast was for sun, I slept with the curtains open.  All winter, waking up has felt like suddenly discovering myself at the bottom of a deep hole.  Sure enough, at 7 AM, spots of pink shown through Jack Frost’s handiwork on our east-facing bedroom window and beamed straight across the room to leave a few interrupted circles on the swirled woodwork of my bureau.

After oatmeal, when the temperature had warmed almost as much as it would, I strapped on snowshoes and hiked through the field and up a steep hill that rises like a cold volcano.  And there, on the open face, bracketed by trees, I heard not the chick-a-dee-dee call of year-round, but the two-note whistle, a song for the maidens which, in the still air, rang out like the door-bell of spring.

Without wind, my hat pulled down and my scarf pulled up so that only a small sliver of eyes were visible, warmed from my step ascent, the temperature was bearable.  The chickadee no doubt has registered this extremely cold winter—he certainly has spent more time at my feeder.  But it surely wasn’t the temperature directing his song on this 3-degree morning.  It was the photoperiod, the longer day.  He doesn’t act according to the fluctuations of the jet stream, that earthbound current of air which dictates how high the mercury will rise in the glass bulb of a man-made instrument; so much as by the revolution of our planet around the sun, which, along with the earth’s tilt on its axis, dictates how much of that great ball of orange we will see.  He is moved by bigger things, hinged to the universe at large.  And I, too, must remind myself of that in this winter whose cold has tested my patience:  we are all part of a bigger picture.