Homeward bound

Rainy days are usually quite pleasant to me, probably because of my boyhood conditioning, when rain meant freedom from most outside farm tasks. But it was different when I stood recently at the floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows, gazing out at grayness and rain. My family had come home for the holidays, but would be leaving soon. And holidays themselves, especially as they end, are often periods of melancholy. I focused on the winter-blooming sasanqua, its red blossoms the only bright spots in the landscape. Until an even brighter scarlet spot moved from under a sasanqua bush to within a few inches of my feet. My longtime neighbor, a brilliant red cardinal, was ignoring the rain as he strolled about searching for food under the hanging bird feeder at the window.

A pair of cardinals have made this yard and the surrounding woods their home for more than sixteen years. Given their normal life span, the male and female I see these days have to be descendants, not the originals. But cardinals don’t migrate hundreds or thousands of miles like some species. The fellow I see ignoring the rain, his feathers wet but unsubdued, is a homebody. He and his mate would have been born and spent their days within no more than a few miles of these bushes and lawn that they frequent. And while his mate is less flashy than he, and more given to holding back under the shadow of the shrubbery, she is no subordinate partner. When they sing, she often chooses the melody and he follows along. When they prepare a nest, he may offer her bits of building material, but she does the building, pushing and stamping the place into the shape she wants. I admire the male cardinal for his startlingly bright red coat, but also for his willingness to defer to his mate when it’s obvious that she’s smarter than he is. And for his devotion to home.

My children and grandchildren have, I hope, enjoyed their holiday visit to what is a welcoming residence but not their home. No matter how enjoyable the visit, I suspect arriving back at their own home is a more meaningful blessing. There’s a unique comfort to getting back home, that place with its own blemishes, faults, and familiar facets that welcomes you back no matter how bedraggled and out of sorts you are. The cardinal will be able to shake the water from his feathers and relax, I presume, when he settles onto his home perch in the woods not too far from my window.

It’s too easy, even downright silly, to attribute human characteristics to animals. Even domesticated pets are probably not nearly so much like us in their actions and affections as we like to think, and wildlife surely is not very close. But I can’t help finding agreeable the cardinal’s affinity for home and wondering about how he and his mate think, if what they do can be called thinking. I wonder if, in the blackness of the night, he awakens and shifts his position, finding exactly the right familiar groove in his home tree branch without having to search for it, just the way my hand finds the familiar light switch in the dark without conscious thought.

Cardinals live with threats, just as we do, and I wonder if this bright spot of color near my feet is concerned that his mate may fly, as some have, with breakneck speed into a window, ending their relationship forever. While he gives no indication of exceptional fearfulness, continuing his search, even in the presence of sparrows and a chipmunk, for seeds tossed down by a titmouse or a chickadee from above, surely he must be aware of how fragile his life is. I wonder if he is awakened at 3 a.m. by a thunderstorm and stays awake worrying about life and death and what will happen to this home he loves when he is gone.

Worthless musing. I’ll never know if cardinals think and worry and exult. No matter. Like me, he is attached to home. And like me, he may not know what his purpose is on this planet. But I think at least a part of it must be to provide a bright and heartening flash of color on a gray and gloomy day. Quite a valid purpose, I would say.

This story was originally published January 7, 2017 at 2:45 PM with the headline "Homeward bound."