Chickadees and the seeds of sanity

David Sherman

It’s a small town. If you don’t know just about everyone, you know of them. A small, formerly English enclave in a valley in the Laurentians north of Montreal. Most of us came in our 20s, many are still here. I took 50 years off, working and spending in the big city – isn’t that what one does in the Big City, work to spend? It’s here I wrote my first newspaper story, my ticket to the bright lights of the Sherbrooke Record and then back home to Montreal to work for bigger papers and magazines and then came back here where I’ll write my last novel and probably breathe my last breath.

The town has changed. Covid prompted an exodus from the big town and newcomers were accompanied by dump trucks and ravaging of forests and disappearance of white-tailed deer who never missed a carrot they couldn’t smell a hundred metres away.

The English enclave is now bilingual. Newcomers are young, carry wee things called babies and miniature canines and cell phones and speak both official languages with ease. Though conversation seems supplanted by madly thumbing phones.

They know not that the town’s official language was once music. In the hotel that burnt down and every weekend at Rose’s Cantina, really Penny Rose’s house. She was 29 when I wrote my first story and she was its subject. The Cantina was the centre of town and Penny had music every weekend, large dinners for the invited dozen and the artists who were playing that weekend. Some are still playing similar gigs or house concerts as they call the shows today. It’s a slog these days but it’s who they are and always will be. Minstrels and court jesters.

We were in our 20s when the town was jumping with music and soft drugs and cheap wine and unemployment insurance cheques, cashed at the corner grocery store. There was only one real corner in the town. It’s still there, as is the grocery store where you can no longer cash cheques but you can find Indian, Korean, curries and Chinese condiments, a decent pizza and more brands of beer than I knew existed.

But we’re now in our 70s, a few have hit 80-plus and this week two we all knew died. There are more people than I know with cancers or are post-op survivors. More than I know waiting for results of ominous tests, doctors’ appointments, wrestling bureaucracy to get doctors’ appointments. Popping blood pressure and pills and blood thinners and stuff i don't need to know about.

Music still the heartbeat. If not at the Legion, it’s at the local bar, in the park or at the annual Super Folk festival. Sometimes the Friday market has an acoustic trio to help sort through the farm-fresh salad fixings.

Most men have lost hair, most of us have lost our girlish figures as well as the need for the habitual schlep to Montreal for theatre or fancy dinners. The closest town has fancy dinners at city prices. We have a local theatre and wide screens to watch all the films we want. And we now have enough new local traffic so we can dispense with the joys of the city’s cocktail of clogged highways, impossible parking and people sleeping in doorways and an air vents. (Definition of getting old and crotchety.)

Here, the unhoused sleep in cars or tents hidden in the back of cemeteries.

With the weight of the ravages of aging is the added burden of seeing the world tearing itself apart, the news tragic-centric, endless streaming broken only by advertising.

Minds clouded with the casualties of our pasts, the loved that disappeared, the cruelties of the present and threats of more of the same.

It’s not limited to the U.S., though that’s what obsesses some. It’s everywhere. Carnage is the oppressive harmony these days and when it’s enough, which is always, I can sit in an armchair by the picture window and watch the birds.

I blame Peter who deals in slabs of meat fat he drills into the tree outside the kitchen window before coming in for coffee and conversation. He slogs through the snow, fat in one hand, electric drill in the other and screws slabs of red woodpecker treats to the aged maple. Not quite sure what happened last time, but his glove is screwed to the tree along with the fat. Haven’t seen him since but I’m sure the rest of him is not under the snow where the squirrels tunnel. Unless he brought his phone with him.

But this season’s brittle cold and suicide-inducing news required more than Peter’s one-gloved generosity. Reinforcements were needed.

The front balcony railing is on the other side of the picture window, about three feet from my seat by the fire. And, last week, their bird bath frozen – couples splash around in warmer climes, taking turns wetting down their wings – I grabbed some seeds Peter had donated and sprinkled them on the frozen bath, along the railing and on the window sill. Curiosity and desperation for some control the driver.

Birds are smarter than us and, within minutes, chickadees and finches and nuthatches and woodpeckers and who knows what else spread the word. The railing was covered in birds. The window sill, the frozen bath. Some gorged, some pecked and picked and shuttled back and forth to the tree in front of the house.

If I move too quickly from my perch, put my book down or swivel the chair, they will flee and wait for the all-clear sign. Research tells me they speak in a variety of tweets to say, “Chow time, come and get it.” They also can hear the food being sprinkled and they will spread the word on the quality of the offerings.

Of late, they are slightly less skittish and when I spread the goodies they are back before I can get back in the house. They gorge during the day to use the calories to keep warm during the night when their metabolism slows and they sleep.

Sometimes they have to duel with a piggish squirrel who can never eat enough and cares not a whit if I pound on the window to scare him like idiots who pound on the boards at hockey games.

“Let the birds, eat, out damn rodent.”

The birds, only a few feet away, are what lights up the wide screen that is the window, minus the Ozempic commercials. They’ve replaced, at least for now, the life-long habit of needing an injection of fresh calamity every few minutes.

The birds have no control over what will happen to Venezuela, Columbia, Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia or the Trump crime family. And they don’t give a shit. Like us, they stay here for the winter, stay warm as best they can. Unlike us, they close their eyes to the foolishness and greed of humans and appreciate the smallest of things, a few seeds, a nest, the kids they feed before they’re pushed out of the nest.

With their help, I skip reading the Times, CNN, the Guardian and a few thousand influencers, whatever that means. Feed the flock and make that and our nest, my partner, the next meal, the guitar, our friends and attendant illness and tragedy, the total of a shrinking way of life.

The birds that now cruise on the other side of the window seem to have had it right all along.