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 a few minutes at this point. My sister, a witness to this, looked like she was watching a tennis match, her head turning left and right. And so it continued, “How could a cardinal sit on a wire? Do you mean a fence?” My mother surely was mistaken, and I knew better.

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. At this time, my mother didn’t drive. We had to take taxis to all of our appointments. This conversation happened as we walked from my orthodontist appointment to the mall. From there, we would call a taxicab to bring us home. We had no idea how this simple moment in a nondescript day would become so memorable in each of our lives. 

The walk to the mall was over a mile (there was a hill, of course), and we were on the sidewalk. Walking alongside the busy road, we had to talk louder to be heard over the rush of the 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 had enough of this Abbott and Costello routine. She interrupted this 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 to that of 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 close to fifty years since this happened, and I don’t even 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, both 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 little signs from heaven that Mom is still present in my life. 

My daughter’s ninth birthday was her first birthday 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 Julie’s birthday. My words were still in the air as I walked to the glass door and looked into the backyard. And 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 in sharp contrast with 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 birds at a time. 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. If I were to take all my life stories and weave them into a tapestry, this story would give it an area of bright red. This crimson red would also be visible in all the moments of my life.

A few days ago, when I was at my sister’s house, I 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 crimson 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 down a sidewalk by a busy road. Their conversation was quite animated…