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Cardinal in the snow

Ok, more about winter after all. Sorry... the season weighs on my mind, and when it's bad like it is now, it's a heavy weight indeed. Here's one of the more pleasant memories I have of winters past.

I spent the first seven years of my life in Mullens. It was a wondrous place for childhood, a place of apple trees, fireflies, honeybees, owls, blue jays, trains, and fire trucks. We lived in a house on the side of a hill — which doesn't really narrow it down much, because a large portion of Mullens is on the side of a hill. One of the things I remember about our house is the picture window on the stairs.

Halfway down the stairs was a small landing with a picture window. The picture window faced out into the side yard, filled with trees. One winter, Dad got the bright idea to hang a bird feeder in one of the trees in the side yard. The picture window gave a perfect view of this feeder and all the avian wildlife who came to partake of the sunflower seeds within. I was maybe five years old that winter, and one day, I found Dad sitting at the window with a camera. (Dad was a bit of an amateur photographer in the 70s — and he'd not yet turned thirty.) He was pointing the camera out the window, and when I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was taking pictures of birds.

From what I remembered, the feeder was pretty far away from the window, so I wasn't sure how Dad was managing to get any good pictures. He pointed out the zoom lens to me and told me it worked like binoculars by making faraway things appear closer. I was familiar with binoculars, so I understood the concept. Then Dad asked me if I wanted to help him take a picture of a bird at the feeder. Did I ever!

So Dad held the camera's viewfinder up to my eye, and there was the feeder, out in the snow, as plain as if it were right in front of me. He told me to keep watching, and if I'd let him know when I saw a bird, he'd take the picture. So we sat there for awhile, and before long, a bright red cardinal landed at the feeder. "Ok," I said, and Dad clicked the shutter. And when the pictures were developed, that cardinal was as bright as the day he landed at the feeder and looked just the same as when I saw him.

The winters of my youth were filled with heavy, steady snow, so it's been easy to travel back to those times in my mind the last several days. And when I'm outside futilely sweeping and scraping snow off my car and cursing the cold, sometimes I'll think of that cardinal outside the picture window and smile.