Conversation With the Birds

We stood huddled this morning, my dog and I, in the wind and snow.  I had my shoulders hunched and my collar turned up.  She had her ears pinned and her head lowered.  Her dixie-cup ears tend to catch the wind and the rain and snow, so she clamps them shut against her head when it's inclement weather.

It is the first day of spring.

The first day of spring and we woke up to snow.  Again.  I waited in the wind for my dog to find the perfect spot, and I sighed.  I'm pretty sure the sigh rose from my toes.  Nothing around me looked like spring.  It was cold.  Windy.  Snowy.  It looked like another verse of the Song that Never Ends.  It just goes on and on, my friend.  Never changing.  Enough to drive one mad.

It is supposed to be the first day of spring and it's just another day of Endless Winter.

But something broke into my gloomy thoughts.

Birdsong.

Lots of it.

I heard the cardinals first.  Full-throated notes, the male serenading his mate in a spring love-song.  Then the hearty chuckle of . . . robins?  It took me a moment to place the sound.  I haven't heard it in so long.  But it was!  It was robins!  I searched through the trees and found them -- my first robin-sitings of 2014.  And then came the liquid song of a red-wing blackbird, gurgling through the air like a creek over rocks.  I found him, too, hanging onto the thinnest of branches, buffeted by the wind and snow, head thrown back in triumphant song.

"Birdbrains," I mumbled into my collar.  "You silly birds!  Fly!  Fly for your lives!  Fly back to where it is warm and safe and there is food to eat!  Can't you see it's not spring yet?  Leave now, while you can, before you freeze to death or starve to death!"

But they didn't listen.  They stayed right where they were, defiantly throwing their songs to the wind and the snow.  The words formed words, and the words spoke to my heart.

"But it IS spring!  Just because it doesn't look like it doesn't change the fact.  It IS spring!  You are looking at circumstances, and doubting.  We are looking to the One who has promised that while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.  You silly human!  What are you going to believe?  The things that you see, or the unfailing promises of the Covenant Keeper?  Where is your faith?"

I winced.  Who was the birdbrain?  Then I smiled.
And laughed.
Just a little, but the sound rolled past my lips and joined the chorus of birdsong, human harmony with the melody of the birds.

It is spring.  It really is.