Northern Cardinal

And heartstrings plucked

For almost a quarter of this century I lived outside the USA. In my experience, I found that there are two main types of difficulty when it comes to adjusting to life in a different land. One is the type of difficulty that smacks you right in the face and tells you “You’re not in Kansas anymore, kid.” Different foods, different climate, different customs, and of course a different language. (You know, it’s true what comedian Steve Martin said: Those foreigners have a different word for everything!)

The other type of difficulty is more subtle. Rather than hit you up the side of the head, it just sits there quietly in your heart. It demands no attention, but it is having a big impact on you all the same. It’s a longing for the homeland, for the familiar. The things that tug at the heartstrings. You can overcome all those smack-you-in-the-face difficulties, but this deeper yearning never goes away, even if you’ve long stopped noticing it.

I woke up one March morning, back in Chicago after a five-year stint overseas. Actually, I’d been home almost six months already. Overnight a late winter snow had fallen. The storm had moved out and a bright sun was piercing the slats of our bedroom blinds. I could hear the water dripping from the maple tree outside our window as the heavy snow melted. A Cardinal started singing, and I started crying. They were not tears of joy, nor of sorrow. They just welled up from somewhere forgotten and unexpected, like the sap rising in that maple tree.

I had not heard that sound for five years. That singing Cardinal plucked a string in my heart that had sat there taut and waiting for a long time. It was alive now, and it sang: You are home.

There is much to say about the Northern Cardinal. About the fact that they do not migrate, so they are here with us all year round. Or that the male keeps its bright red cloak through all seasons, unlike most birds, who trade their bright spring wardrobe for drab colors in the winter. The Cardinal’s massive beak looks powerful enough to unscrew the lug nuts on your car’s wheels, and I have seen beaks on some Cardinals that look as if they tried just that--scratched and worn like my favorite old pair of pliers. And did you know that both the male and the female Cardinals sing, and that they mate for life?

I wonder if there’s a lesson for us among all those Cardinalities.

If you want to learn more, go ahead and Google it. But as for me, there’s only one thing that need be said about the Northern Cardinal. It’s the bird that brought me home.