by Jami Smith

Created on: June 02, 2008

Hurrying Ahead of Winter

I have a memory. In it, snow dusts the spruce in my grandmother's back yard. The tree looks still and peaceful, until we look closer, and see its branches hopping with life. If we open the window, the tree also speaks to us in a chorus of tseet-tseet and chicka-dee-dee-dee. Chickadees gather at the feeder, and cling to the peanut butter slathered pinecone hanging under the eaves. They grab a seed and then fly off. We sit at the kitchen table, the snow-light bathing us, the leaves of a wandering jew winding overhead, framing the window. We each have a jar of peanut butter and a spoon. Our fingers push sticky the peanut butter off the spoons into the spaces of pinecones. Other birds flutter, pulse in and away from the feeder, but the chickadees are the nucleus of this life, this dance for food. These are the birds that capture our eyes and our minds.

My grandmother and I shared this project every weekend over the winter. We filled feeders, we stuffed suet into cages, and we crammed Jif into the biggest pinecones we could find. This was her way of helping them survive the cold and barren winters. She loved chickadees. She loved all birds, but chickadees were far and away her favorite. She admired their sassy personalities, their complicated calls, and their spunk. Unlike other birds, they stayed around for winter, fluffing up in the trees and cuddling together in nest holes to preserve their body heat. Even after she wasn't well, and could no longer take care of herself, she still insisted on helping the chickadees, and we hung a feeder outside her window at the nursing home. She died in 2002, right after I found out I was pregnant with my first child. She'd resided in a nursing home for several years, living with congestive heart failure, the remnants of a stroke, and failing memory-an ongoing visit from Alzheimer's.

There's an interesting fact about chickadees, one I wish I could share with her. Their survival depends on memory. Each autumn, chickadees cache single seeds throughout their half-mile range. They scatter hoard. Each seed goes in one of many places, tucked behind a shred of bark in this tree, lodged in a nick on a broken twig in that tree, a thousand seeds hidden in a thousand places. The hippocampus portion of the brain, which is critical for memory storage and spatial learning, swells with a map, a forest of X's dangling from branches. When easy food runs out, chickadees turn to these stashes in order to survive. The chickadee

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