Cardinal Summer

Fall is here. Brisk rain-humidified air, the saturated colors of trees turning their flushed cheek toward winter, the smell of earth rising from the damp soil; the crunch of leaves underfoot. It is my favorite season. I shared it last year, this year it is just for me... it feels good to allow my focus to turn inward; to be finding my way toward contentedness. I've needed it.

The summer passed by without even being a summer. The days were cool. I used the air conditioner only once. It was marked by a visit with my dearest friends from college - long overdue and sweet and intense for the longing I've held in my heart to hear their voices in unison again.... and a local cardinal influx. The bright calls of the cardinals followed me everywhere I went this summer. A longtime friend called it the cardinal summer, and it was. Sitting on the back porch of her house, overlooking the steep drop of the woods as they plunge toward the lake, I was surrounded by bird song. I wrote this there, it was for someone who broke my heart but I loved anyway:

Cardinal Summer

In my retreating dream
you call to the Cardinal
your laughter-tinged
red-winged mating song
unrolls the moss underfoot;
calls spring leaves from bud --

The stirring and the first rays,
the sleep-heavy arm
around the warm contour of your body;
eyelids fluttering toward open.

Soft.

Soft, I rise
to bird-twitter commentary
on the rising of the sun.

-- Summer, 2009


People come in two camps. The kind that go to the ends of the earth for you and the kind that won't cross the room. It was a cardinal summer for me, not just for the bright song of the birds following me, but also for the lessons learned in this regard. For all the tears that ushered it in, it was filled with realization, birdsong, laughter, fire, accomplishment, tromps in the woods... and the kind of friends that would go to the ends of the earth for me.