A Hummingbird in Winter

I was minding my own business when several people tagged me at once on a post in a local portmanteau Facebook group, MOV What's Happening. It's kind of a like a NextDoor for Marietta, Ohio and Parkersburg, West Virginia, with everything from the latest convenience store robbery video to fires, car wrecks, lost pets, hair salon recommendations and pleas for help with a hummingbird in December. Does anyone around here rescue hummingbirds? Oh, yes, Julie Zickefoose does. Tag. Tag. Tag. Tag. Arrrgh.

What are the chances that this is actually a hummingbird? I thought. It was very late, around 11 pm. I was very tired. I didn't want to get sucked into the vortex. There was no photo with the post. Maybe it was a goldfinch. How could it be a hummingbird, in Parkersburg WV, in December?

When I woke up at 7 AM, there she was, in my Facebook inbox, asking for help with her hummingbird. I sighed and messaged back, asking for a photo. She obliged.

Well, dip me in chocolate and roll me in peanuts. Not only was it a hummingbird, it was a Selasphorus,  either a rufous or an Allen's hummingbird, which, after all, is what you expect for hummingbirds in West Virginia in December, if you expect them at all. Which you don't. 

For those who don't know, rufous hummingbirds, and sometimes Allen's hummingbirds, which are both of the genus Selasphorus, occasionally move east in winter, instead of south. They come from their breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and Canada up to Alaska, and for some strange reason they fly until they hit the East Coast, and then they try to survive New England winters. Some of them make it. Some of them even return to the East year after year instead of going to Baja and Mexico and Central America like they're supposed to. Nobody knows why they do it, but they're remarkably cold tolerant and can eke out a living, especially if provided with a warmed nectar feeder all winter. 

Now take a look at the rufous hummingbird occurrences on an eBird map from Oct 2022-Feb 2023.

Sightings are in purple. Yeah, my jaw is hanging open, too. Citizen science at its best! 

So this eastward push in fall and winter is something rufous hummingbirds do, whether it's good for them or not. Who knows. Maybe it's working for them. Maybe winter hummingbirds will be commonplace as the planet warms. 

Rufous hummingbirds are the reason I take my feeders down in September and keep them down. Because if I ever got one at my feeder, I would give everything I had to keeping it alive. And I would be worried sick through every sleet, ice, and snow storm. Sick, I tell you. Worrying about rufous hummingbirds is why I did this painting. If I ever got one at my feeder in winter I'd be trying to make it wear a little hat. I'd be making it a heated house to live in. It would not be good for either of us. So I take the feeders down. I do not want a hummingbird here in winter. It would drive me mad.

Christina explained that her dad found the hummingbird sitting all puffed up with its eyes closed atop a colorful windchime on their back porch.

Pause to think about that. It was hoping there was nectar in that windchime, hoping its bright colors meant it was a feeder. And when it wasn't, the hummingbird just gave up in the freezing temperatures and went into torpor. 

My heart broke for the first time, thinking about that bird in the freezing cold, hoping, then closing his eyes.

She had it in a cardboard box, in the dark. It had been without food for many hours the day before, then overnight. My brain jumped into action. I told her to get a big plastic box, like a foot locker, that was clear, that had a lid. The bird had to be able to see to be able to feed. Bring it out into the light.

 Then I asked if she possibly had a hummingbird feeder. She thought she might. Put that in the foot locker, put the hummingbird in with it, and see what happens, I told her. She sent me this video not long after, and my heart got squeezed, seeing this tiny creature responding so well to the help she was giving.

 

From that moment on, my day was given to the bird. He was out of immediate danger of starvation, feeding himself. He could stay right where he was; Christina was wonderfully competent. I spent the next six hours texting, calling, waiting for callbacks, reaching out in several different directions to try to find a place for this hummingbird to recover. 

My first choice was a large rehabilitation center two hours away. I couldn't get through to a human by phone, so I sent a Facebook message. Luckily, it was answered by a volunteer, who said she would check to see if they would take the bird. I explained that I was a licensed wildlife rehabilitator looking for care for a rufous hummingbird that had been found in bad shape the night before.  I sent the video above, and she relayed it to one of their animal care specialists. 

Shortly afterward, the volunteer got back to me and read off a bunch of information to me about overwintering rufous hummingbirds. I listened in silence. Yes. I knew all those facts. They didn't need to tell me any of it. She explained that they wouldn't take the bird because it was neither sick nor injured. Wait. This bird is found in horrible shape sitting starved on a windchime in 28 degree snow cover, and I'm being told to turn it loose back out into the snow again? Well, yes. It's not injured or sick, so there's no reason to take it in.

But look at it! Yes, it can fly, but it's not strong, it's not OK by any stretch of the imagination.  I'm not putting it back out into the freezing cold. And there's no way to explain that to the animal care specialist, because I'm not talking to them, and they're not talking to me. I thanked the volunteer who had relayed all the helpful information and hung up. I understood their position, and it might have worked with a robust hummingbird with a steady nectar source, but not with this bird. And I don't think they were seeing what I was in that video clip. A hummingbird that flies all puffed up is in trouble.

 OK. Two hours away was my closest option, and that's a no-go.

All the while, I'm thinking about whether I could care for the bird. Yes, I've got this great big heated greenhouse full of flowering plants. Yes, I'd love to try. But... the greenhouse is made of glass. And as soon as that bird got to feeling better, he'd buzz his wings, pick up speed, and fly straight up, smack into the  glass ceiling. And that would be that. I'd have killed him with kindness and optimism.

So I made another call, and sent another Facebook message to another rehabilitation center, and those went unanswered for several hours. Time was a-wasting. Finally my friend Ryan called a mutual friend who knew someone at the clinic I was trying to reach, and I sent Shane the video, and Shane sent it to Amanda, and I got a four-word answer back. "They'll take the bird." 

By now it was mid-afternoon, and I'd been trying to get an answer since 7 AM. The bird was 45 minutes away. I set out driving. It was after dark when I got there. I kind of knew which house it would be as I drove through the pitch-dark neighborhood. 

It was a house of kindness and light, the only one lit up on that whole street. I was warmly greeted and shown to the kitchen, where the tiny hummingbird, surrounded by hungry teens, bustling dinner prep, and several very interested cats, was calmly feeding from an old hummingbird feeder inside a plastic footlocker. Incredible.

Christina knew about hummingbirds because she had lived in Arizona and fed them there. Lucky for this one it picked her parents' house. She had even gone to a pet store and bought wingless fruit flies to offer him. I wanted to transfer him to my nylon hamper, so we took the footlocker and hamper into the bathroom just in case the bird got out. Christina said he'd gotten out while she was tending to him and flown all around the house, with cats in hot pursuit, but she managed to catch him again and get him back in the footlocker. Yipes. I don't know how many lives hummingbirds have, but this little guy had used several.

I caught him without incident, put him in my  hamper, and headed back home. I hung a little feeder from the ceiling of the hamper and left him alone. He was clinging to the side of the hamper, stressed and unhappy, and he spent the night that way. 

In the morning he was buzzing around the hamper. I didn't see him use the feeder, which worried me. Sure enough, he ran out of gas and wound up on the floor of the hamper. Oh, no. I took him in hand and after about ten minutes I got him to take some nectar from an eyedropper. It wasn't easy. 

 

After he ate,  he seemed better, and I switched out the hanging feeder for one more like the one Christina had offered him. To my vast relief, he drank from it on his own. I knew I needed to get a little video that wasn't compromised by the mesh hamper. I'm so glad I did. His beauty took my breath away. I'd never seen a rufous hummingbird so close, or so incredibly red. So beautiful. So dear. 

We had to hit the road. I was headed to the Ohio Bird Sanctuary in Mansfield, and it was a solid three hours away. I still didn't love the way the bird was acting, and my little voice said, "Might want to give it a day, see if he improves before you make a drive like that." 

But that wise little voice was drowned out by a muffled howl from my soul, telling me I wasn't up to the job. He was going to leave me if I didn't get him help. I tried one more time to feed him, without success; he just wouldn't swallow. I loaded everything in the car, packed a few snacks and some tea, and took off. Before we left the driveway, the feeder had tipped over, dumping nectar all over the hamper floor. I had to turn around, clean out the hamper, and find another feeder he might use that wouldn't tip over. It was 10:15 AM, and we were off to a very poor start. 

I stopped at 11 and tried to feed him. I couldn't wake him up, no matter what I did. This was not good. But I had the bit in my teeth now. I gave up, pressed the accelerator and prayed, eating away at the miles, glancing worriedly again and again at the little bird who hadn't moved.

It was only 24 degrees up here, but at least there was blue sky. I hadn't seen blue sky in way too long.

I got to the Ohio Bird Sanctuary around 1:15 pm and took the hummer to the triage room. Amanda, the director, met me there. I told her he'd been without food since 10, and that I was afraid I was losing him. I asked her to hold him for me so I could photograph his spread tail, something I hadn't been able to do one-handed. I had been corresponding with Allen Chartier, a bander who could help determine if he was rufous or Allen's.

This pose, with his wings wide out...a hard thing to look at. 

It's all in the tail feathers, the second rectrix to be exact, and as anxious and upset as I was I just could not get his tail spread wide enough to get a good photo of it. It kept folding up as I tried.  It was notched (rufous), but it didn't appear lanceolate (Allen's) to me. I suspect this is a pure rufous hummingbird. 

 Amanda couldn't have been nicer. She took him and put him in an incubator, and that was that. 

By now I was in tears, and I had to leave for home or drive much of the way in the dark. I don't like the short days of December, and I don't like driving in the dark any more.

But I couldn't leave without visiting the birds. The cheerful visitor's center receptionist gave me a tiny cup of dried mealworms and sent me out to the aviary. Two blue jays and two cedar waxwings descended on me. Which only made me cry more. How I miss communion with animals and birds, the touch of another living creature! To someone who has spent so many hours with a budgie or a macaw muttering away on her shoulder, so many summers raising wonderful baby birds, so many years with a good dog by her side, living alone without animals is not good. And now I was leaving a precious jewel here, because there was nothing I could do for him any more. The touch of waxwing feet and feathers was like food to a starving person.

I didn't even notice this hermit thrush had only one eye (the one he keeps on me) until I watched him for awhile.

The birds who live at the Ohio Bird Sanctuary are unreleasable. I am so very grateful that this place exists, to give a home to birds who can't fly well enough to migrate or live wild, but who still have so much joy to give to the people who are lucky enough to come visit them. The Sanctuary is not just for longterm clients. They heal and release lots of birds, but they're unique in keeping unreleasable raptors and songbirds around for the public to enjoy and interact with. It's a beautiful combination. I got to meet the gentleman who helped start it in 1988. You can read about its history here

 https://www.ohiobirdsanctuary.com/about-us

The thrush at the end of this clip is not a hermit, as I guessed. When I saw the video, I recognized it as a veery! Who gets to stare at a veery??

There was a father with his adorable young sons there. They are members, and they come regularly to commune with the birds. The boys had asked to come visit the birds today. They were so quiet and respectful and gentle. 

Look at this little guy with his waxwing pal.

I felt SO much better after lingering awhile in the aviary, communing with the kids and the birds. I stopped to visit with a great horned owl, who was hooting the last time I visited several years ago when I was dropping off an injured blue jay. I suspect has been hooting ever since. 

This is the outdoor classroom at OBS, which you reach along an 

elevated boardwalk. I'd love to be there in summer, too.

A very cool timelapse of its building in 2022 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUnvtzgYPwk

I think I see Amish craftsmanship here!

Shadows were getting long when I left. I thought I might find a nice Amish meal on the way, but it didn't happen.  I grabbed a horrible sloppy Joe, threw it away after one bite, found a quick burger at another diner and kept rolling.

And the moon rose over an open field

The moon never looks as huge in photos as it does in person. It was like a great big old beach ball. 

I had about 20 minutes to race through the garden shop at Sheiyah Market in Berlin before it closed at 6 pm. It's one of my favorite places. I bought a teeny tiny poinsettia that makes me smile. 

I could tell it was just a rooted tip cutting of a regular poinsettia, but I love it just the same, and I don't have room for a great big floppy one. Tiny cur for scale. Me being me, I'll transplant it into a bigger pot and let it be what it is destined to be. 

I stopped to watch the moon rise over the marketplace, vying with the streetlights for size and brilliance, and it made me feel better. Christmas is coming, and I'll see my beloveds soon.

When I got home, there was an email waiting from my new friend Allen Chartier, who had heard through the grapevine that the little cinnamon-brown hummingbird had died before I even got home. Nine hours in the car, 420 miles total over two days I'd driven, and I knew even as I was leaving that morning that he wasn't going to make it.  He was so special, so lovely, so sweet. I had to try, for him, and for the sweet family who took him in off their wind chime. 

I've been sitting on this story for a couple of days, grieving for a tiny soul I only just met, and I finally realized that the only way to process it and to feel better about it is to tell it to you. As my friend Ryan, who ought to know, said to me, "Big hearts break hard."

If you would like to contribute to the good work of the Ohio Bird Sanctuary, I'm sure they would appreciate the help. Tell them it's for little Rufous. 

https://www.ohiobirdsanctuary.com/support-the-sanctuary

Liam is 26!!

 

Liam is 26! I know. I can't believe it either. And this is, I think, the first morning he's woken up since I started blogging in 2005, without a birthday post all ready for him. But I don't think he minds. This was taken at his breakfast birthday party in Columbus and I don't think that's Hi-C in his glass!

Yeah, your mama was found slumped over a book at 8 pm last night, and that's all she wrote yesterday: Nuthin.' So better late than never. It's still your birthday, and you and Ayla are on your way down here soon, which feels like a birthday present to me! I've got a nice meal prepped, which involves the last of the garden produce: a poblano pepper plant almost as tall as me, that showered me with goodness in November. 

I'm so proud of my artsy son. You work magic with your hand and eye. Please keep doing this, and I will too. It'll be a pact. Nobody draws Mac Miller like you do!

I'm so happy you've found someone as wildly artistic as you are. Who understands your creative soul and shares the gift. Ayla can draw and paint and make 3-D things like nobody's business! One would be hard-pressed to find a more talented couple. Or a cuter one!

You both love the beautiful things in life. One of my favorite memories from Phoebe and Óscar's wedding preparations was the day we all sat down and arranged flowers for the Faraway Friends Party tables. 

It felt as natural as breathing to be arranging flowers as a family, because aesthetics is what we do around here. 

Many thanks to Missy Fleeman for the FABULOUS flowers from her emerging flower farm right up the road! We used them well! That's Syrie, our wedding planner, to the left. 

A candid photo from the First Look in the wildflower meadow...

Loving on Curtis, who was all dolled up and loving the hoopla.

Nothing could have made my heart burst more than to see you stand in for your dad, bringing Phoebe down the aisle. You do him proud, lanky king. And you bear more than a passing resemblance to him.

Sometimes I step back and look at you two and say, wait a minute. These are my kids? The Siblings Dance was definitely one of those moments. Lightning in a bottle. 

And these are just the moments from July. You delight me and make me proud every day. And now you're 26, my beautiful boy. Keep on dancing, drawing, laughing, and making people happy. You are a gift.

        Wild, wonderful, sweet, gentle, hilarious, and just a wee bit weird: that's how I like my sons. 

                                                           Happy birthday, Liam! 

 Love, Ma

Hard Work, Old Memories, and Sweet Friends

Y'all, I have struggled with these wedding posts, more with each one. Here's the thing. There was SO much to do, all built around this looming deadline of The Wedding. Much of it was, at least in my mind, necessary. House renovation. Brushpile burn. Garden enclosure razed and rebuilt. Rotten deck beautifully replaced. That had to happen. But some of it, I know, is totally peripheral. Was anyone going to go poking in my cluttered basement on July 26? No. Nobody was going to go down there. But it mattered to me that all these nagging things be DONE and laid to rest before the big event. In the Thompson family, this displacement behavior was called "ironing the curtains." Whenever they went on a family vacation, Elsa would pack the kids and all their stuff, and then, before everyone got in the car, she'd iron the curtains. She couldn't be stopped. Had to do it. No judgement from here. 

Late June and July were the months when we buckled down and finished things. Phoebe and Óscar's wedding was to take place on the 26th, and that was a real cattle prod for me. I always figured I’d get around to re-purging the basement in the winter of 2024, but it didn’t happen. It was a thorn in my side, knowing that it needed to be cleared and straightened yet again—2021 was a long time ago! Finally, in the third week of June, I headed down there and gave it the week or so it needed to be tidy and navigable again. 

With each basement purge I am forced to face my obsession with cardboard, and boxes. Oh, and jars. 

Anything that could be useful gets saved, to excess. Hangover from my old freelance days when I was forever sending original watercolors through the mail. Sturdy cardboard--I still save it as if I were still doing that, instead of sending electrons through the ether.

Phoebe helped, clearing out our music room in the basement. Here is where she and Liam had deposited things nobody needs any more, like extra-long twin bedding sets from their dorm rooms. Hello, Goodwill! She went through her dad’s recording stuff and tidied it as much as she could, consolidating cords and equipment. We laughed at our shared memories of when Bill would be recording podcasts, and we were under strict instructions not to walk, move, talk, run water, flush, or, let's face it, breathe in the house, lest we make a wayward sound and evoke a furious pounding on the wall or, worse, a heavy stomp up the stairs. This could go on for quite some time...

For these and other memories, and a heavy dose of superstition, neither of us can bear to tear down his podcast recording place. His laptop sits in place, full of inestimable stuff, waiting for what? We don’t know, but it’s somehow sacred. What do you do with your husband's now-ancient laptop? Or, for that matter, with your own? It’s stunning how all that stuff that was so important just fades into irrelevancy when you have to leave the earthly realm. It was his stuff, and now it's no one's. I like to think that, by raising, feeding, caring for and finally fledging the kids and helping carry BWD Magazine into the future, I've checked the biggest boxes on his list. 

And here's the other hard thing about writing about this. There is so much to attend to, just to pull off the various events. I honestly think Phoebs and I are still tired from it all. And writing about it is throwing a lasso around that herd of THINGS that must be done. And it makes me tired just writing about it. I don't even know if it's good reading. I just have to record it all, to honor the effort that went into it.

All summer long, Phoebe worked to string together the cadre of vendors who would help us pull off this looming event. No, these events. Some vendors were elusive; some were responsive. Each was a fresh challenge to engage and work with. She logged hours on her laptop, researching and emailing, crossing T's and dotting i's. 

Particularly sharp readers will note there is a bird on the kitchen chair. His name is Chak and he is a northern mockingbird we raised, this fine and abundant and exhausting summer, from a cat-punctured pissed off ball of feathers to a beautiful free spirit who ruled the yard. I will tell his story elsewhere, but for now, just know that Chakky-boy got us through the summer. Heavy lifting for a mockingbird, but he was fully up to the job. Long live our sweet baby Chak, wherever he's flown off to!  Love you forever.

We knew the reception needed to be under a roof. We didn’t fancy trying to feed 140 people in a tent in our yard without electricity right by. We figured that, for the ceremony, all we needed was an hour without rain. But for a reception, we really, really needed to get everyone into a building where we could sit them down at proper tables to dine in comfort. So we engaged a nearby venue for the reception. That was a good move. It was air-conditioned, and had bathrooms, and July was proving to be hot as Hades. For two, it was a very cool place, and close by! More on that choice later.

 Doing this neatly solved the problem of where to put the many dozens of cars that 140 people would use to get here. Bill and I had been married in his family's church in Marietta, and we hosted the reception for 163 at our house, on September 11, 1993. And I remember there being a bunch of tables and folding chairs in the yard, a couple porta-potties too, and an absolute stringer of cars all along our (dirt) township road and driveway and piling up in the area around our garden. We also parked a bunch of them at the end of our long meadow. I remember assigning younger friends to give parking directions to everyone, and people having to walk our quarter-mile gravel driveway in dress shoes. The younger crowd came walking up the long meadow from the small parking area at the end, and that was a beautiful sight. Bill always said his favorite moment was seeing our friends walking up that meadow to the house. But that kind of walking is a lot to ask of older folks. 

I also have a vivid memory of our caterer running clean out of food before Bill and I got to the line. (You couldn't set aside a couple plates?) I remember stomping inside the house to fix peanut butter toast for us both, for our own wedding feast. Here, honey, have some fuel for the biggest day of your life. Best I can come up with under the circumstances.

 I did not want a repeat of ANY of that, nor did I want my carefully curated yard to become a parking lot for this event. On a preliminary visit to the reception site, Shila had an inspiration. We’d park all the cars at the reception site and shuttle them over here for the ceremony.  Then, when the ceremony was done, we’d shuttle them back, they’d enjoy the reception and dinner, and then be able to walk right out to their cars and head to their lodgings. Brilliant. Shila's like that.

All of this, of course, was easier said than done. Although the venue had a people mover bus, in the end, we had to hire another driver and van to get everyone back and forth in a timely fashion. But our yard was car-free for the wedding, and we got the people from A to B, and it was all pretty smooth, because we'd really thought it out.  

 Phoebe had known enough to hire a wedding planner for this event, and I’m really glad she did. Syrie Roman helped keep us on track and attending to the million details as needed. She made us a timeline and told us what to do, and when. It was a lot. There was so much pre-arranging to be done! Syrie was always cheery, always decisive, and she made recommendations, then gently let us figure out what might be the right thing to do. She also told us when something was way out of line. Never having done this, we had only a hazy idea what was a reasonable charge and what wasn’t. Or who was supposed to supply what, and how much that should cost. It all seemed outrageous to us. 

                  Syrie and Phoebe walk through the ceremony on the Wedding Grounds, July 15. Chak flew out to oversee the proceedings.

 Here's another thing. It wasn’t just the wedding. We pulled off four events in four days. 

First was a birthday dinner for me, for 12, on my new deck, on July 24.

Second, on July 25, was a party for 40 long-lost and long-traveling friends, coming from places as far away as California, North Dakota, Madrid, and the Canary Islands. 

At first we thought we’d do that party here at the house, and we went as far as talking to a caterer and building a menu, but as the pressure built, we realized that doing it here would have been pure madness, with the ceremony also happening here the next afternoon. No, no, no! 

I had attended a lovely catered party at the Barker House in Devola (a suburb of Marietta) earlier in the year, and as I cased the place, I knew it would be the perfect venue for around 40 come-from-away friends. So right then and there I talked to the owner and engaged the venue for our pre-wedding party.

It worked out incredibly well. In fact, that evening is one of my favorite memories from that time.

Oscar and his lovely mama, Vicky, on her first trip to the U.S.

Óscar and his old friend Féderico from Argentina.

We told you they were faraway friends!

Seeing Phoebe reconnect with her dear college classmates was such a joy. Her sweet face was just split in a grin all evening long.

Aaron, Óscar, Phoebe, Nate and Sam

Carinna and Phoebe with Carinna's soon to be husband Carlos. Two Americanas who met their mates while on Fulbright fellowships to Spain! Naturally, they have a very special, sweet bond.

In August, Phoebe and Óscar would travel to Barcelona to attend Carinna and Carlos' wedding!

Quite the jet-set! 

One of my favorite moments at our Faraway Friends party was when Phoebe and Óscar's dear friends Fran and Aaron came rolling up with their baby boy, Santiago, whom Phoebe and Óscar had yet to meet!!

And then came Paul and Ingrid, too!! These were all mythical figures for me. I'd heard so much about them, but hadn't gotten a chance yet to met them! They more than lived up to their advance billing.

Santi was SO sweet, and a huge hit! You can see Phoebe is dying to get her hands on him.

Our dear, dear friend Yo, who we hadn't seen in way too many years.

He called me a couple of days before the wedding, asking if he could wear shorts to it. 
I told him NO.

It was such fun to see Yo meeting Ayla, and seeing Liam all grown up!

A blurry sweet shot of Phoebe and Tim!!

John, Kris, Lisa, me, Yo, and Ann! What a combo!!

It was such a beautiful rainy evening, and the place was just perfect for our get-together. 

Phoebe and Zach, such a dear friend from Bowdoin days. Oh, these photos do my heart good! The joy! the joy!!

 We knew we’d regret not having time to really talk to and connect with these folks, so having a catered party for them in town the night before was a master stroke, and, as tired and stressed as we were by then, we had an absolute blast there. (With apologies to dear friends who were there but somehow didn't make it to my camera roll. I tried, but it was pretty hectic!) 

 All the hugs and laughter with our friends that  evening just melted the stress away. It came roaring back, of course, but Friday July 25 was a charmed evening. We would use that abundant love to get us through the next couple of days. 

Oh Rotty Deck, It's Time to Go

Oh my. What a bittersweet thing, to come back to this post I finished on September 11, and see our beloved Curtis Loew loafing along all through it. He was wound into our lives in the most beautiful way. I have not had the heart to post on the blog since he left us on September 12, but as Robert Frost noted,

"In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on." 

So you can see my little gentleman again, all through this post, and read the words I wrote when I hoped he be here for weeks, months, even years to come.  

I've just waved goodbye to Shila, Marcy, and Bruce. They arrived around 8 AM and the birding off the deck was so good they stayed until 11:30! The list stands at 44 species and I'm sure I'll keep adding to it as the day wears on. Friends: they help so much. Birds do, too.

I had a secret in back of my house. It was a rotting deck that had been built by the folks we bought it from. It had served us well as a birding  and flower platform, but weirdly, we never used it for sitting or dining out in summer. 

That had a lot to do with the wide, view-obstructing boards, and the extremely splintery wood. That wood was always a huge hazard to anyone with bare feet. I had to go to the ER for a gigantic plank I ran into my pawpad when I was pregnant with Phoebe. I was almost too big to lie on my stomach for its extraction. Traumatic memory unlocked!

Lately, a human foot-sized rotten hole had opened up, and I realized that I could not have more than a hundred people and kids swarming my place with a hole in my deck. Time to call D & L Construction and Backhoe again! (I had actually arranged this almost a year ago; they're busy people!)

Teardown commenced in the first week of June. 

I was not sad to see that deck go!

Before I knew it, the house was deck-free!

Here's what it looked like from inside the living room...Eeeek!

It was a thrilling week, watching the new deck go up. 

The deck stairs and railing were still under construction when most of the BWD Magazine staff came for our annual content and cover planning meeting--the third one, all held here. Can we really have been putting this magazine out for three years?

From left: Advising Editor JZ (Whipple OH), Editor Jessica Vaughan (Columbus OH), Photo Editor Bruce Wunderlich (Marietta OH), Managing Editor Dawn Hewitt (Marietta OH), Publisher Mike Sacopulos (Terre Haute IN) and Publisher Rich Luhr (Tucson AZ). In one day, we put together issue plans for 2026. Then we stood on the new deck! I love my co-workers and publishers, and feel very, very lucky to call them colleagues. 

The stairs hadn't been built yet. Here they are--wide and generous, with a nice landing, and I can carry lawn chairs and plants up and down them without a problem. Couldn't carry anything easily up the old  narrow stairs. 

Curtis loved the new deck and its easy to climb stairs. 

That evening, Liam came home and got to see it too! I'm glad I got the lightest color of composite for the decking; it's beautiful and it doesn't get too hot to walk on barefoot, even on a scorching day, I'm happy to report.

Railings are aluminum, I believe. 

It is divine. And we love the outdoor living room underneath. No rain falls through the composite boards; it is channeled out of holes in the end of each one. If you click on this photo you can see the holes. In a heavy rain (I'm told; we haven't had a heavy rain for a hella long time) the end boards of the deck will sort of spurt water, but everything underneath it will remain dry. It's so awesome to have my air chair and lawn chairs down there and not have to haul them in every time it rains. Well, it never rains any more, but still. 

The deck also protects the HVAC system from crap falling into it (literally) from above. The old deck had wide spacing between the boards and, when we had a lot of raccoons around because I was still feeding birds in summer, they used the back corner of the deck as their latrine and it would fall down INTO THE AC UNITS now how GROSS is that? Just another reason why I don't feed the birds in warm weather!

See those diagonal struts? Donnie designed and added those, contributing immensely to the solidity of the overall structure. He said before he built those in, he could push the structure and make it move! Coudln't make it move now--it is super solid. This is a very new deck system, and it isn't cheap, nor was it easy to put together, they said; the instructions need work. I am so glad I got total pro's to build it. The distributor told Donnie he'd priced out dozens of these, but this is the first one he'd seen that actually got built. 

Well, somebody had to go ahead and buy one! 

The deck is made by Timbertech. And I adore it!

It follows the trend of most of my recent renovations, using Hardieplank siding on the house (that holds paint really well, never rots, and doesn't need to be replaced).The greenhouse is incredibly sturdy double paned thermal glass and aluminum; you can walk on the roof.  I used metal on the new roofs. It's guaranteed for 40 years. Yep, that oughta do it, at least for me. We long-term homeowners take a dim view of rotty things.

Pretty much everything is a platform for plants...

the gray squirrels haven't ventured up here yet to eat my last big hibiscus.

And now it's safe in the greenhouse, so there. 

I have eaten practically every dinner out here since the deck was finished. It's heaven! And the railing doesn't impede the view much at all. I really like the slender railing.

Curtis got his tick checks here, and I brushed him out in the mornings on the deck.

We are out there all the time. This fall, I've been holding little warbler watching parties there, birding by butt. It is DIVINE to see the birds at eye level in the birches just off the west side. So much easier to get good photos when seated and steady!

I love how it looks with its feet in flowers.

Yep, this deck was now wedding-ready, a month and a half before the big day. Mission accomplished!

And from the comfortable remove of having done it, I am now hugely enjoying birding from the west side. I go out there just after 7 AM and don't come in until about 9:30, my joy-cup full of warblers, vireos, tanagers, thrushes, nuthatches...holy COW it's great! 

A wee bit of what I've been seeing:

Chestnut-sided warbler, ahhh

a very bright male Cape May warbler (one of dozens on dozens)

The birding has been fabulous. And on the deck itself, Salvia guaranitica attracts all the rubythroats to the second floor.