Cardinal on a Wire
“But, I don’t understand. What was a cardinal doing on the wire?” I asked my mother yet again.
Exasperated, she responded, “He was just sitting there.”
This conversation had been going on for some time at this point. My sister looked like she was watching a tennis match, her head turning from me to our mother, as things continued to escalate. And so it continued, “How could a cardinal sit on a wire? Do you mean a fence?”
Using my name and the tone that mothers are so good at, she continued, “No, Carol. It was a cardinal - sitting on a wire.”
Let me back up a little bit. My mother didn’t drive and we had to take taxis to all our appointments. This conversation happened as we walked from a dentist appointment to the mall, where a taxicab would bring us home. We had no idea how this simple moment in a nondescript day would become so memorable in all of our lives.
The walk to the mall was over a mile (there was a hill, of course), along a very busy road. We were on the sidewalk and had to talk loudly to be heard over the constant rush of cars. Casually, my mother said, “On my way to church this morning, I saw a cardinal sitting on a wire.”
I picked out three words from that sentence: church, cardinal, and wire. By connecting the first two words, the image in my mind was that of a gray-haired, saintly gentleman wearing a red pointed hat. So, what was he doing sitting on a wire?
And that is how we got to this standstill. I, trying to picture a man dressed in red, balancing himself on a wire and my mother, matter-of-factly talking about a bird she saw on a wire overhead.
My sister was the one to break up this Abbott and Costello routine. She interrupted the hilarity with, “Wait a minute. I think you’re talking about two different things here.” And, of course, we were. I was talking about a priest who had gone up the ranks, a cardinal. My mother was talking about the stunning, crimson-feathered male bird, a cardinal. After I recovered from the initial embarrassment and tried to explain my thought process, we had a good laugh!
It is almost fifty years since this happened and I don’t have to close my eyes for the video to play in my mind. I could even take you to the exact place where we were. It became one of those infamous stories, then, and throughout the years. After that, cardinal sightings became ‘a thing’ in our family. In the twenty-five years since my mother passed away, they have been many signs from heaven that Mom is still present in my life.
My daughter’s ninth birthday was her first without Grammy, and I physically felt the void. Crying out to my mother through a torrent of tears, I wished she could be with us to celebrate the day. My words were still in the air as I walked to the sliding-glass door and looked into the backyard. There it was, a cardinal in the middle of the lawn, just sitting there! He wasn’t in the distance, hiding in the trees. He stood out, the bright red of his feathers shimmering against the lush green of the lawn. This bird wanted me to see him!
That is just one instance of a little gift from heaven. There are many more! And, now that Dad has passed, I see two cardinals. Seriously! Driving to my first day at a new job, I was about a mile away from the office when two cardinals dive-bombed my car. Again, they wanted to make sure they got noticed, and they were.
The ‘cardinal on a wire’ story is just one of the many stories unique to my family. It’s stories like these that make up the tapestry of our family. If this bright red were to represent my parents, it would be the predominant color, and give the tapestry depth and life.
Recently, I was at my sister’s house and noticed movement outside the window. I looked out to see what it was and saw him, a cardinal - on a wire! He was just sitting there, his deep-red feathers glowing in the early morning sun. But, as I looked at him, I saw a different scene…
A mother and her daughters were walking on a sidewalk along a busy road. Their conversation was quite animated…