Spring Has Sprung

I awoke this morning to the buzzing sound of a table saw and walls being knocked down in the kitchen. My parents are having the room remodelled and since I don't have to be into work until noon this week (thanks to having to administer the state standardized tests at night) I am here with Frank Vidmar as he works solo on tearing out and rebuilding the kitchen. This morning he was hanging a new door to the hallway.

I have an interview with the CCO scheduled for this morning, so I had to go out to my car to get a few things. That was when I noticed spring. I love that first morning when you finally realize that winter is dead. I walked out barefoot to my car and with my soft feet splashing on the misted driveway, I heard the birds cheering from the trees. The English Starlings chattered like a thousand jacks-in-the-box and the Chicadees watered the air behind the Starlings with the Chicadee's echoing call. Across the street there was the chitter of Warblers and Titmice. And these are only the calls that I recognized. Inside, above, and beyond these calls was sprinkled the feather throated call of those thousand other species of bird that my ears have not yet learned to distinguish. All together, the song of the birds makes the triumphant call of spring. I stood in the driveway with my hand on the door handle, and looked out into the tips of the bare trees to see them leafed with tiny black birds.

During winter, when I was a child in the car, my father and I would drive under the telephone wires and every so often they would be lined with tiny statue birds wearing their black winter petti coats. They huddled next to each other perched unmoving on the thin black wires above us. I remember one day asking my father what the birds were doing, and he told me that they were going to church. The image has stuck with me to this day. Even now, when I drive under a bird clogged wire, I like to think of them sitting reverently through Church.

This morning when I stepped outside and saw the tree branches clogged with ten thousand tiny birds, I imagined that they were most assuredly going to church. I guess it makes sense to think that no matter where birds are they must, in some way, be going to church. Of all God's creation, I see birds as the most religious. The sing to Him all summer long, and then when the summer nods its golden head to sleep, most of them retreat in order to attest to the analogy that winter must be. Even with most of the birds away for the winter, a special breed always remains as if to say that even through death, the promise is not forgotten. And then, on a warm spring morning like today, and they suddenly appear in droves, shouting Hosannah's from the tree tops at the ressurection of spring.

So, this morning, I noticed that the birds who have been steadfastly going to church every day through the winter, have now joined that great winged cloud of witnesses in the trees. This morning, for the first time since the last leaves fell, the birds gathered in the trees and shouted out to the world "He is risen." And the Chicadees echoed "He is risen indeed."