Hummingbird Salamander(12)
[17]
All the other usual things. Precious as any amount of money, but worthless until they’re gone. Until you really feel the loss.
My husband’s sister, her husband, and her son came over the next evening—they lived three hours away. Just far enough they didn’t visit often. So we were supposed to put them up that week. He knew I could only take a couple days before claustrophobia set in, but I would be gone by weekend.
The son always brought out the tour guide in our daughter, so they often were outside. The husband talked seldom and his sister talked too much, though I liked her well enough. They just wrong-footed you with their extremes. She was in pharmaceuticals. Kept mistaking what I did for what she did, because we both used “strategy.” Kept asking myself what strategy had led me to mutilate a dead hummingbird.
The banal inconvenience of not being able to relax in my pajamas in the evening. The “holiday cheer” I loathed from past experience, of pull-out beds and futons and close quarters in the bathrooms. Past slights between siblings that came out between my husband and his sister that made me roll my eyes because my husband didn’t always know how good he’d had it, family-wise. Dinners laced with too much wine and beer because, underneath it all, we were not always comfortable with one another.
The sister’s husband was a conservation biologist. That could not be easy. At the time, though, the biologist exasperated me. Such a narrow focus. All the wonderful things in the world. All the ways life was better even if the world wasn’t. This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops.
Mulled wine and stockings over the fireplace. Crisp smell of the six-foot fir that had been cut down so it could be adorned with plastic and glass baubles that polluted the house. As the tree died in celebration, there in our family room.
Maybe I was withdrawn during their visit. Maybe gregarious and lighthearted on the outside. Who knows? My daughter was a dervish, though, I know that. She could not stop moving. When not playing host, she could not stop assisting me with chores or in the kitchen or out shopping for the holidays. Her energy, even now looking back, had a febrile quality, like she was making up for some lack in me.
The fireplace. Hot cocoa. The warmth that hits you in the face and the hands and the stomach. Surrounded on the U-shaped couch, after a heavy dinner of turkey and sweet potato casserole and stuffing, by people in Xmas sweaters and the TV spouting sports off to the side, sweetly raucous.
Can it have been true? Can it?
Every day, off to work I went, gym first. Then my husband, who was on holiday break, would text about something before I had even turned on my computer. I needed to pick up an item for the family on my way home or confirm dinnertime, or whatever was on his mind. Wrapped up in his arms, the clutches of his family, even sitting there at my desk.
This normalcy should have pushed the hummingbird farther and farther from me. Pushed the idea of Silvina away from me. To have this secret life, but no fear of it swallowing me. Even if Silvina’s world had begun to encroach on mine. Instead, it had the opposite effect. I was thinking about it all the time.
“Are you happy?” I asked my husband late one night, around the kitchen island, the teenagers asleep, the adults half comatose from leftovers, in front of a television talent show.
He kissed me, smelling of his sandalwood aftershave, and sweat. Because he knew I meant was I happy. As if he had to monitor that for me.
But, deep down, I knew I was going to follow the thread. I just didn’t realize how far that would take me.
[18]
Oh, the flowers, Silvina. The flowers and all of it. Videos entranced me, watched on a burner phone from the go-bag I didn’t realize would have other uses.
This creature that was everything I was not. We could not be more dissimilar, and yet, inside, I felt a welling up of sympathy for the toughness. For the miracle of this creature. Was this a gift Silvina gave me, too? How the world opened up? How it kept opening up.
The hummingbird went into a kind of suspended animation, or “microhibernation,” each night due to the high number of calories it needed. “Torpor” was a word I’d never considered, as in “Torpor decreases their metabolism by 90%, their heart rate by 15 times, and their body temperature from over 100 degrees Fahrenheit to the ambient temperature.”
Torpor. They ran hot, so very hot, but then got so cold, like icy jewels there in the mountain. Clinging to a branch. Hidden by foliage. Dreaming of what? Did they dream of anything? They died, in a sense, every time, and the sun resurrected them. The nectar was life. Miraculous, and as I learned more and loved them more, I loved Silvina more and more. What I felt must have been what she felt, although how could I know?
The flowers, too. The flowers. The words connecting hummingbird to blossoms that I hadn’t known, like “nectarivorous.”
As is the lifestyle of hummers, S. griffin maintains a symbiosis with flowering plants, and particularly those in the family Solanaceae. In the Pacific Northwest, it is often associated with upland larkspur (Delphinium nuttallii), but also utilizes columbines, fireweed, and heaths. Each flower provides a sugary snack that satiates the small tank and the high burn of the hummingbirds, but only enough so that frequent visits, to many flowers, promotes pollination.
Larkspur! Columbine! Fireweed! The “small tank,” the “high burn.” All of this new information lit tiny fires inside. I took such delight, and delight didn’t come easy to me. But it did here.