It’s one of those months, friends. We’re winding down the school year here in Nebraska, which means cranking up the end-of-year school activities like orchestra performances and choir concerts and extra rehearsals at the crack o’ dawn and field trips and field day and soccer games and “Mom I need a white wig that looks like Albert Einstein’s hair for my oral report tomorrow.”
I had a speaking engagement on Tuesday night and another one coming up on Saturday, which means I’m breathing into a paper bag all the hours of the livelong day.
My parents fly into town Friday to stay with us for a week, and yesterday Brad discovered ant hills — as in the actual sandy hill homes of ants — lined up all along our basement floor. Which really does explain the proliferation of ants we’ve been experiencing in the kitchen of late.
Josie Belle, our plush Corgi-Beagle who displays the occasional Elvis snaggle-tooth sneer, has decided now is the perfect time for the Epic Shed. Every time I turn on my vacuum cleaner (which is at least once a day), it emits an odor reminiscent of a big pile of old mangy dog hair.
On the up-side, one whiff of the big pile of old mangy dog hair and my kids hightail it up to their rooms, which means I get a little peace and, albeit smelly, quiet around here (aside from the roar of the vacuum, of course).
So in the midst of the end-of-school-year-speaking-engagement chaos and the endless errands to the grocery store and the dry cleaner (read: Epic Shed) and the endless vacuuming (read: Epic Shed), I decided last week was the ideal time to go bird-feeder shopping. Because priorities, right?
Turns out, best decision. Ever.
After much consternation in Wild Bird Habitat, Noah and I settled on a finch feeder. For the past couple of weeks now I’ve glimpsed spectacular flashes of bright yellow at my neighbor Karna’s feeder, and I decided I needed some of that spectacularness in my own backyard.
So yeah. We stole Karna’s finches. We bought a feeder and filled it to the brim with Nyjer seed (I think the fact that I now know what Nyjer seed is means I am officially a Bird Know-It-All), and have successfully lured Karna’s goldfinches into our backyard. And now I have the pleasure of sitting at my writing desk and watching the spectacular flashes of yellow land on my feeder and eat my Nyjer.
[Okay, truth be told, the goldfinches still like Karna’s yard too. We are sharing them.]
My sweet yellow visitors have been teaching me something important this week: sometimes, even in the midst of vacuuming up ant hills in the basement and praying that will “take care of the problem,” and even in the midst of speaking engagements and choir rehearsal and white Albert Einstein wigs, you simply need to stop, step your bare feet onto the cool concrete of the patio, peer stealthily around the umbrella, and gaze, still as a statue, at the most spectacular shade of yellow you have ever seen.
This week, my sweet yellow visitors are teaching me that sometimes, it really is all about the littlest things.
** And speaking of yellow and little things (best segue ever, if I may say so myself), did you know my friend Deidra Riggs has written a book, and it’s called Every Little Thing: Making a World of Difference Right Where You Are
