The Visit of the Cardinals

A January sixth musing

I look back at the holidays just past. Jack Frost had had his way with us.

The tricky giant had made his presence known across the vast land. He had spread his icy fingers far and wide. Not quite to all corners, but far enough for infamy. He was the influencer of the season, it seems. Certain Starlettes in Hollywood may have recently aspired to be the Queen of Christmas, but it was that Chilly Trickster who was the talk of the town!

It was during this time that our visitors came to the small patch of earth which my family and I inhabit.

My daughter was the first to point them out.

“Wow! Hey, Mom, look at all the cardinals in the backyard!” she said as she picked up her binoculars to get a better look. (She’s the birdwatcher in the family, that one).

I walked in from the kitchen, where I was doing some holiday cooking in order to get a better look outside.

“Hey, hon,” I said to my husband.” “Come look at all of these birds in the backyard!”

He got up from his recliner to look out the glass door leading out to our deck and backyard.

“There’s more Cardinals than the Vatican!” he quipped.

My husband’s spot-on assessment of the scene was no joke. (Well, of course, it WAS a joke, but there were seriously A LOT of cardinals in the backyard!)

So, the point of this little story is that on that cold, cold day (a couple of days before Christmas, if memory serves me), we had more cardinals in our yard than any of us had ever seen at one time, in one place before! It was pretty cool.

Anyway, my imagination got to wondering why in the world all these cardinals had shown up! (It had nothing to do, of course, with the huge, newly placed, bell-shaped hunk of birdseed and suet that my daughter had hung up earlier that day on the old clothesline post outside).

So, what was the deal with all of these cardinals?

Why had they shown up here in such numbers? Why now?

Was this some sort of planned insurrection? Was this organized? Or, rather, had it “just happened” — organically, so to speak?

My mind wondered and searched.

And then I googled it…

“Hey, hon”

“Yeah?” my husband answered.

“Did you know that the sum total of all the Cardinals at one time in the Catholic Church is called the College of Cardinals?” (This was not exactly the information I had been searching for, by hey — it caught my interest!).

“Uh, that sounds right”, he answered. (My husband knows about a surprising number of things). We are not Catholic, so I was unfamiliar with this terminology.

“Isn’t that interesting?!” I continued.

“Uh-huh.” I was losing him.

“Apparently, that term came about in the Middle Ages”.

“Cool.” He was humoring me now.

Anyway — I had intended for this piece to turn into a profound, literary short, perhaps with a piece of poetry embedded somewhere inside — this musing about the cardinals in my backyard. But time is running short, and this little brain dump will have to do for now!

So, I had been thinking that maybe this gathering, our personal “college of cardinals”, so to speak, may have had something to do with the twelve days of Christmas. Perhaps the puffed-up, chilly birds were harkening the birth of a child wrapped in swaddling clothes? After all, the clothesline where the suet-bell was hung was in the shape of a cross. Who can say for sure?

The time of celebrating Noels is quickly coming to a close, so perhaps this mystery of cardinals will have to rest until this time next year. But, it truly was a beautiful sight!

I’m just glad that I was able to witness it. To fellowship with them as they pecked the seeds from the ground — the seeds which other, smaller birds had scattered there due to their inefficient eating from the suet-bell hanging above.

The peaceful small flock which visited us for that short time… it had certainly been a tentative harbinger of sacred days ahead.

Now, time to finish putting away the last of the Christmas decorations!