I Need A Moment.

a frozen moment to warm your heart.

Why can’t I write right now? I have so many moments to share! Farm moments, flower moments, droplet moments, sky moments, little wild creature moments, feeling tiny in a great big world moments...

And they’re all right there! One right behind another, frames of images flickering like a slide projector, hints of descriptions shimmering in heady wisps of memory, nearly graspable, a few words crystallizing into an auspicious beginning, but then…exploding into glitter dust. I grasped too hard.

So, so many moments, and here I sit immobilized among them, all of them just out of reach, lingering on the margins, not quite ready. Captured moments are a bit tricky like that.

Sometimes, what the moments are trying to tell you is that you need to take a moment. Stop mapping out work-schedule itineraries and take a detour to visit an old friend. Sit on the front porch of your mind’s eye and let the moments drift by on gentle breezes guided by golden dapples.

And that’s when I found myself, at last, in the moment I had been looking for.

This moment is Chickadees on Ice. It is one of my (many) favorite, absolutely unexpected, entirely delightful bird moments. This little flock of chickadees are regular visitors to our bird-feeders, cheerful hand-feeders, and just generally present as a fixture of our daily lives around the homestead. They are chatty, inquisitive, sociable. They’re always in a flutter, so busy, at home in every season and in all kinds of weather in this little corner of Maine woods that we both call home.

And in Maine, in the winter, when you have a roof, icicles periodically happen. Icicles are fantastic in themselves, and I’m often distracted by them, in this light and that light, chasing them around snapping pictures of their many moods. On this day, they sparkled in the sunshine. A feathery commotion drew my eye to the window where our feeders hang. And I let out some shocked-tickled-unbelieving noise that had everyone in the house asking, “What? What’s going on?”

“The chickadees! They’re perching on the icicles!” And so they were.

I grabbed my camera and joined the throng of family-onlookers at the window as our little feathered neighbors did something we had never seen before. Something about the perfection of these icicles, on this day, in this light, at this temperature, inspired an impromptu frolic in their own little winter wonderland. They busily swooped in and out, visiting the feeders, but also visiting the icicles. Perching on this one, then that one. Swooping away as one came crashing down, only to circle back and land on its neighbor. Observing the incessant drippings of icicles overcome by direct sunray assault, they occasionally rested from the excitement and sipped glacial droplets.

It was fleeting, of course. In the space of just a few minutes, the sun had shifted and the chickadees had melted into the shifting forest shadows, leaving me with the realization that I had rather-blandly imagined their tiny lives up to this moment. Flutter, hop, peck, perch, preen. If they were inclined to the occasional icicle rodeo, what other unimaginable entertainments might they get themselves up to when I wasn’t looking?

Since then, I have occasionally glanced out the window to see a chickadee perching on an icicle - but never again on a sparkling sunny morning, and never again (perhaps for that reason?) with such enthusiasm and liveliness. But I am forever changed - because for the rest of my life, whenever there are both icicles and chickadees, I will watch the windows with hope!

I had long since gathered up my favorite images from this happy morning and placed them into my print gallery. I’ve shared, on various occasions, and in various formats, the story of this enchanting moment. And yet…because I was re-visiting this moment with no particular agenda, just absent-mindedly wandering along the well-worn path of treasured memory, I found something else unexpected…A new favorite image from this day!

For reasons I can’t ever fully comprehend, a mind filtering through images for the “keepers” just isn’t fully reliable. I’m not sure why I overlooked this shot the first time around. Because now, the sweet sparkle in his eye, his neatly tucked wings, the halo of winter sunshine all around, grasped me fully by the heartstrings and transported me instantly back to that moment of surprised gasps, astonished giggle-whispers, and hearts overflowing with affection on a golden winter morning!

Sometimes the most wonderful thing about revisiting treasured moments is discovering the small ways in which they always have more to offer. Like a stone polished by constant turning, they become lovely in new ways, reminding us that, because they are captured moments from the expansive wonder of life in this vast world, their gifts are inexhaustible. Turns out, I really needed that moment.

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shop custom prints: Chickadees on Ice - Forest, Gray, Sunshine, Portrait

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