Hummingbird Hope [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on August 14, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Hummingbirds bring to mind my great aunt Dorothy. Outside the door of her tiny mountain home, precariously perched – and tilting slightly – on the hill above the Central City Opera House, she maintained a festival of brightly colored hummingbird feeders. She was a no-nonsense woman who cooked her meals on a cast iron wood burning stove. She loved her hummingbirds.

I felt Dorothy hanging out with me when I planted the cardinal flower in the huge rusty-ancient-fire-pit that we placed near the hummingbird feeder to help attract more hummingbirds. Kerri loves her hummingbirds.

For weeks the cardinal flower was flowerless. It did a fine Jack-and-the-Beanstalk imitation, growing tall, reaching for the sky. “Where are the blossoms?” she asked. I shrugged. This was my first cardinal flower so I was clueless. I was, however, mightily impressed that it had grown taller than me.

Hummingbirds, like us, are not fans of very hot and incessantly humid weather so they abandoned our region and sought fairer climes. Their absence has been palpable. There were so many zipping about earlier in the summer that their disappearance is magnified.

Unusually, because of the heat-smoke-and-humidity-combo-platter, we’ve mostly been inside, staying close to “the cold box”. We’ve abandoned our usual outdoor living and make only quick forays into the yard to water plants, pull weeds, and harvest basil or jalapeño peppers. As the weeks passed we’d mostly forgotten about the flowerless cardinal plant. We stopped refreshing the hummingbird feeder.

The first pop of color nearly knocked us over. The red was electric against the viridian ivy slowly covering our neighbor’s garage. Within a few days, despite the persistent heat and humidity, a single hardy hummingbird visited and drank deeply from the blossoms. Kerri quickly whipped up a new batch of sugar water and refilled the feeder.

We’ve not yet seen another. I imagine the lone hummingbird was a scout for the hummingbird clan and reported that although it found a brilliant cardinal plant and a fresh batch of sugar water, the conditions remained unfavorable. The smokey heavy air was not ideal for flight.

And so we wait.

Dorothy used to stand at her kitchen door, watching the hummingbird feeders in her tiny mountain yard. “They give me hope,” she’d say.

We watch our feeder and towering cardinal plant from the kitchen window. “Do you think they’ll come back?” she asks.

“Of course,” I say. “We can only hope.”