The Hummingbird at the Peony — On Small Magic and Simple Pleasures

I am not an ornithologist or a serious birder. I just pay attention. And yesterday afternoon, paying attention turned out to be exactly enough.

I should tell you upfront that I am not a serious birder. I do not keep a life list or belong to an Audubon chapter, although I do own a field guide with tabbed sections just in case. I am simply a woman who notices birds — their songs, their nests, the particular busyness of a bird bath on a warm morning — and finds something in them that warms my heart. That is the full extent of my credentials and I offer them without apology. What I have learned, somewhere in my fifties, is that the simple pleasures women over 50 tend to overlook — the ones that happen in the margins of an ordinary afternoon — are often the best ones. Yesterday afternoon was a perfect example.

But hummingbirds are different. Hummingbirds are in a category of their own.

I have always thought of them as garden fairies. I know that is not a scientific observation. I know that they beat their wings between ten and eighty times per second depending on the species, that they can fly backwards, hover in place, and their hearts beat more than a thousand times a minute when they are in flight. I know all of that and I still think of them as flower fairies. Knowing all of that only makes them more miraculous to me, not less. And if you are the sort of person who likes to imagine friendly creatures at work in the garden — pixies in the hydrangeas, something small and luminous going quietly about its business in the early morning — I think that means you are paying closer attention than most, not less.

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The Calendar on the Wall

Every year I check the hummingbird migration calendar and I wait.

That is really the only word for it. Not casually, not as a passing hope, but with the full attention of someone who knows something wonderful is coming and does not want to miss the moment it arrives. I watch the azaleas because hummingbirds love them after their long migration north. I watch the Japanese maple because it is exactly the kind of place a small creature might choose to rest. I have been known to stand very still at the kitchen window, binoculars in hand, because of a movement in the garden that turned out to be a leaf.

I have never found a nest. The dream of it — a walnut-sized cup of lichen and spider silk tucked into a branch so perfectly hidden that finding it would be a needle in a haystack — remains exactly that. A dream. I look every year anyway. Every year the garden keeps its secret.

But the first sighting. I wait for that one like it is something sacred.

The Afternoon

It happened yesterday afternoon.

I was in the kitchen, just passing through on my way for a glass of water, when something caught the corner of my eye. A flutter. That particular zip of movement that is like nothing else — not a bee, not a moth, not any of the other winged things that come through this garden. Once you know it, you know it.

He was at the peony buds first, which surprised me a little. Hovering in front of them, wings going so fast they were just a blur, his little body perfectly still. And then — he landed. Right at the foot of a peony stem, in the sun, and he sat there.

I grabbed the binoculars without taking my eyes off him. Through the lens he was something else entirely — small and iridescent, more jewel than bird, and he was looking up. Not at me. Not at anything I could see. Just up, into the sun.

I did not move. I barely breathed.

Then he flew into the Japanese maple and landed on a low branch, and he did something I have never seen a hummingbird do before. He sat, then he fluttered his wings and dried himself off. There must have been a bath somewhere that I missed. He went about it the way the birds at the bath do every morning — thoroughly, unhurriedly, as if he had all the time in the world for it.

Three or four minutes, maybe. Then he was gone. A zip, a blur, and just like that the Japanese maple was empty and I was standing in the kitchen window with my binoculars feeling, there is only one word for it, lucky.

On Paying Attention

I have been thinking about this ever since, not about the hummingbird specifically — though I will be thinking about the hummingbird for days — but about what it took to see it at all.

I was not doing anything important yesterday afternoon. I was just passing through the kitchen on my way to get a glass of water. One glance out the window at the right moment, and there he was. Ten minutes that turned out to be the best ten minutes of my day. This is what I mean when I talk about simple pleasures — not grand experiences, not things you plan or pay for, but the ones that find you when you are paying attention to your own ordinary afternoon.

That only happens if you look up. It sounds obvious but it is not as easy as it sounds. We are all so trained to move from one thing to the next, to keep going, to be somewhere productive, that simply stopping at a window because something moved in the garden can feel like time you are stealing from something more important, something on your list. It is not. I am here to tell you it is absolutely not.

The hummingbird was not waiting for me to finish what I was doing before he appeared. The garden does not arrange its moments around our schedules. The walnut-sized nest, when I finally find it, will not send a notification. These things happen when they happen, in the quiet spaces between everything else, and you either catch them or you don’t. You have to be the kind of person who looks up.

A Small Theology of Garden Fairies

I want to say something about the fairies, because I mean it.

There is a version of being a grown woman in this world that does not leave room for imagining pixies in the hydrangeas or feeling a hummingbird’s arrival as something a little bit magical. That version is very sensible and is not the way that I think at all.

Roald Dahl said it better than I can: “Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” I think about that a lot. The hummingbird was always going to come to visit the azaleas, to sit under the peony and rest in the maple, whether I was watching or not. He is only a gift if I am.

Your garden has fairies in it, if you want them there. Your morning has small miracles in it, if you are paying attention. The simple pleasures that matter most to women over 50 — the ones that actually restore something — are almost never the ones you scheduled. They are the ones you almost walked past. You do not have to be an ornithologist. You do not have to be serious about it. You just have to look up occasionally and mean it.

Be the one who watches. It is worth it. I promise you it is worth it.

Tell me in the comments — do you have hummingbirds in your garden? And what is the small ordinary thing that stops you in your tracks every time you see it? I am genuinely curious. I think we all have one.

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Have a wonderful day! I will see you tomorrow for Monday Musings. If you missed Weekend Meanderings be sure to pop in and see Kim and Juliet.

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