Revolution House Magazine Volume 2.1

TREASURE THIS ECSTACY Christopher Martin [Winter Visitors] (January 2011) Just outside my window, birds descend from the bare limbs of sweet gums and water oaks, visiting my feeder, gathering around the seeds I’ve strewn across the snow. I sit on the floor and watch them as my wife and son sleep in the midmorning cold.

The dim light filters through clouds and reveals an array of wings and winter. The titmice and Carolina chickadees are constants most of the year but the weather this morning brings them in droves; they flit about the feeder hanging from the porch awning, sometimes clinging to icicles until a place at the feeder clears. The feathers of the titmice match the sky, once pregnant with snow but now relieved of its labor—wispy slate blue overcoming the gathering, rolling smoke-dark of the night’s storm. The chickadees retain the shades of storm on their bodies, their midnight-black caps, their icegray wings and breasts.

Unlike the titmice and chickadees that will take their sunflower seeds and retreat to the trees to crack and eat them—alighting on the feeder but for a moment—house finches, gray-brown with graces of crimson, cover the feeder, eating their seeds on the spot, rarely moving until they’ve eaten seed after seed. They chatter in the gusts of wind and the advances of swifter birds.

Last night I set out extra blocks of suet—which I make myself with peanut butter, cornmeal, and leftover grease—knowing a snowstorm was stirring, a rarity here in the Georgia piedmont, and that the birds would need more energy to get through the coming days and nights. I put one of the suet cakes in a wire feeder and placed the extras on the porch rail. Chickadees and wrens visit the suet cage at times before proceeding to the seed feeder, and every so often I watch a downy woodpecker bob through the air, as though underwater, and latch onto the cage which twists and sways with the bird’s landing.

My wife stirs, opens our bedroom door, steps softly to the bathroom.

Several bluebirds—as dull a blue as the season, approaching gray—descend on the porch rail to peck at the suet cakes with pine warblers and wrens, a procession of blue, pollen-yellow, and copper set against the snow and the dingy white paint of the porch.

“After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep,” wrote Thoreau in contemplation of Walden Pond in winter. As juncos, sparrows, and mourning doves gather on the ground to eat the seeds resting on top of the ice, and as a cardinal flickers in the deep green of a holly bush, I sense that same kind of somnolent question, which my wife wakes