I couldn’t throw Hyacinth’s medicines away, even though the memories they bring back are not happy ones. I can’t yet part with anything that was hers, even these reminders of her poor health. So I put the medicines in a special box and set them on the little shrine I’ve built for her, next to her ashes which I retrieved from the vet’s office on Monday. I also have the flowers that my childhood friend Brian sent to me all the way from Oregon, some candles, and the scrapbook that I am slowly filling with photographs that serve as representatives of my many memories. I am filling the pages a little bit at a time. I relive the experience captured in each photo as I methodically cut, and tape, and trim. I try to make each page as beautiful as my memory. The effort is in vain; nothing can be as beautiful as our memories of the souls that we love. But the process makes me feel lighter anyway. A picture of Hyacinth is one sure way to bring a smile to my face.
The day after Hyacinth died I heard a bird sing. On that painful, shocking Saturday morning I awoke early. As dawn began to break in the cold January sky I heard it – a little bird singing in the tree outside our bedroom window. Wendy heard it too. I asked her if I had simply failed to hear the singing outside our window on previous mornings. She thought not. She didn’t recall hearing it either. When Sunday arrived the little songbird returned and sang again, this time for just a few moments. Then a train rumbled and roared along the tracks that are only a block away from our house; with a rush the smaller sound of the songbird was overcome. When the train had past and the world became quiet again the little songbird was gone. I listened for the songbird on Monday, Tuesday and throughout the week that followed. I heard nothing.
The scientist in me pitied the poor little thing. It was probably fooled by global warming and had failed to fly south to safer, warmer land. It probably died. It has been a remarkably and frighteningly warm winter thus far in Minnesota. There seems no doubt left at all, except amongst Republicans and oil companies, that our collective carbon footprint is trampling the delicate environment. I wonder what the children of today will face when they are the rulers of the earth. My generation isn’t doing such a great job during our reign. How much damage will our greed and ignorance cause? At the moment I’m glad that I do not know the answers to all these questions. I am afraid of what the answers might be.
The more spiritual and hopeful side of me wonders if the little songbird might be something other than a sinister sign of impending ecological doom. Perhaps, instead, it was something personal, intended specifically for me. Perhaps the little bird came to sing at my window under Hyacinth’s direction, her song a reminder that spring would eventually arrive to thaw the ground and warm my heart. The hurting would eventually stop. The song may have been a message of hope and love sent to me from my little one. I guess it doesn’t really matter if the songbird was a poor, confused, half-frozen creature, or a little angel of comfort sent to me from my loving Hyacinth. It was there. I heard it sing.
Its song helped me imagine Hyacinth running somewhere, dashing through the grass with new eyes and new hips, her little poodle ears flapping up and down with every stride. Her red poodle tongue, hanging out of the side of her precious mouth, would flap in time with her ears. I remember when she could run, long ago, before the ravages of disease and age forced her to be content with a much slower, precious waddle. I can imagine her sheer joy to be able to bounce and move and run again. Hyacinth’s world would be sunny and warm and full of good smells. She would run with her old friend Petunia who preceded her in death. They would run round and round in the sunshine without tiring. They would sniff one another, roll on the ground and nuzzle heads as they did so many years ago when Hyacinth was but a young thing. They would stop to play tug-of-war with a rope toy, munch on a pig ear, or lay perfectly still, orienting and squinting their eyes as they sniffed at a gentle passing breeze. The bird song made me think of Virginia, the smell of green grass, and Miss P. I like to think that Hyacinth is under Petunia’s watchful eyes now.
This morning arrived clear and bitterly cold, as far from Virginia green as can be imagined. The weather is supposed to get nothing but worse throughout the weekend; it’s “no garden-variety cold front” according to the cheerful weatherman who I watch every night on the television for no particular reason. I can’t change the weather any more than I could control the fate of my beloved. Knowing in advance that a Siberian front is blowing in makes it no less frigid when it arrives. I have dreaded this morning, two weeks to the day since Hyacinth left me. But when I walked out the door to go to work I heard the little bird again, singing despite the cold. I stopped to listen for a moment before getting into the car, even though the wind cut through my wool coat like a razor. I pondered as I drove to work, too chilled even to stop for my usual large skim latte. The little bird was made of much sturdier stuff than I. I could not stand the cold, even if the little bird could.
When I arrived at work I heard dozens of little birds chattering away in disharmony; they sounded like tiny Buddhist monks chanting after inhaling helium. I did not understand the words they chanted, they had no harmony or order in their song that my human ear could detect. But they were talking to one another, all the same. I think they were saying something deep, and rich, and beautiful. I think they were all singing together in a song that has significance, it’s just my dull-witted human mind that can’t grasp the meaning. All day they gathered about the bird-feeder that dispenses black sunflower seeds behind my office. They huddled together in the honeycomb structures that line the walls of the building, leaning in to catch whatever heat was able to escape our man-made concrete nest. Not one, but many! Like Hyacinth, the birds have so many friends. They gathered together to comfort one another in the cold.
It doesn’t really matter why the bird sang outside my window for two days and then flew away only to return today with all its friends. I can think and believe whatever I choose to think and believe. To interpret this experience with my mind provides no additional insight or understanding. The bird sang. I heard it with my heart. Like Maya Angelou’s bird it sang for the love of freedom and for the sorrow of the cage. It sang for Hyacinth. She was an un-caged little songbird; her spirit was free and indomitable, full of life and love. But she was also a caged bird, trapped in the prison of a failing body. Like Maya’s bird in a cage, my little Hyacinth sang anyway. She never let the bars of her illnesses defeat her. The cage of her body could not stop the beauty of her voice or the meaning of her song. It came from her soul.
The medicines I’ve locked away in a box and her ashes are all that remain of that cage; they are what I hold onto of her body, sickly for as long as she or I could remember. The caged bird lives no more. While I may continue to cling to the past, Hyacinth has no need of it any longer. Now she is Maya’s bird that lives outside the cage – the one without clipped wings or tied feet. Now she is the bird that can claim the wind; she is the bird that thinks of fat pig-ears waiting to be found on the dawn-bright lawn of morning. Now my beloved Hyacinth is free and can sing for sheer joy, and nothing more.
I know why the cold bird sings. It sings for Hyacinth. She has escaped the cage and is running through warm grasses with a smile on her face. She is greeting her dear old friend in joyful surprise. She is singing and dancing in wonder, amazed at her strong and painless body. It is Hyacinth's voice that I hear in the birdsong. She is free.
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