Pride of the Hummingbird

"Well, come out with it now, what wrong with my girl?” Miss Willow asked me in her soothing smoky voice that instantly brought tears stinging to my eyes.

For the first fourteen years of my life, Miss Willow had baby sat me while my young widowed mother worked to put food in my mouth and shoes on my feet. Miss Willow was the one who kissed and bandaged my scrapes and cuts and soothed my hurt feelings. Now, I was thirty–five years old and still, every time I had a problem or a hurt, I ran to Miss Willow because she always had a way of making it seem better, of somehow making sense of it all.

We both were sitting in matching old rickety rocking chairs on the wooden front porch of her little farm house in the country, me wringing my hands with nervous tension and she gently rocking to and fro while at the same time, shelling fresh garden peas into a basket lying on her lap.

“Jeff and I have been separated for six months now,” I began but choked on the sob in my throat. I wanted, needed to tell her about my pain because if anyone could help me, it was her, but it was proving more difficult than I imagined.

“He cheated on me, Miss Willow,” I gulped. There, I said it. I just let it gush out, got it over with and done.

I glanced over at her to see how she would react to my news but her expression remained unchanging as her old arthritic fingers worked at the peas. To my left, a small movement caught my attention and I looked up to see a little brownish gray female hummingbird fluttering its tiny wings as it hovered over a feeder hanging from a beam in the porch ceiling. Miss Willow loved her hummingbirds and she always put out several of the sugar water feeders every summer, hanging them around all three sides of the porch and in the trees of her front yard.

I looked back down at my hands in my lap feeling the awful, deep sorrow in my heart. This is why I had come to see Miss Willow. I needed her to show me how to make the hurt go away. I thought the pain would diminish over time, but it was still racking me with the same nauseating and anguishing degree as it did the day I first learned of my husband’s betrayal. I couldn’t keep going on like this day after day. It was slowly killing me. It had to get better somehow but I didn’t know how to make it better.

“So what you gonna do about it?” Miss Willow asked, never looking up from her peas.

“What do you mean, what am I gonna do about it? What am I supposed to do? My husband cheated on me. He broke my heart into a million pieces. He ruined our marriage, our life, our future.” There, it felt good to let my feelings all spill out to her like that.

Miss Willow looked over at me then and asked in her usual practical no-nonsense style, “Well, is he sorry for it?”

The memory of him confessing his betrayal came rushing back to me easily because it replayed itself in my mind a thousand times every day. I inhaled deeply and in between sobs, I blubbered the whole story out to Miss Willow.

It had been a one night stand, he said. He never even really knew her. It happened when he had gone to an out of town convention with his business partners. She was an associate of his company from another state. They had been drinking too much, laughing too much, flirting too much, and one thing had led to another. He had cried when he told me about it. He said he just couldn’t continue living with a lie by keeping it a secret form me. He told me he loved me and wanted to always be with me but he would leave if that is what I wanted him to do.

“So, I told him to pack his things and get out. I told him if he had really loved me he never would have done something that would destroy our marriage like that.”

Miss Willow listened to my story as she continued to shell her peas and above us, the female hummingbird buzzed around the feeder, occasionally darting defensively at a bright colorful male when he attempted to approach her territory.

“So, are you getting a divorce then?” Miss Willow asked quietly once I had finished my woeful tale.

I sighed deeply and shook my head. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what to do. I really can’t let myself think of that just yet. Jeff has asked for my forgiveness and asked if we could work things out but I can’t give him an answer. I can’t imagine not being married to Jeff, but neither can I imagine sleeping with him and all the while thinking about him being with another woman.”

Miss Willow sat her basket of peas down on the porch beside her feet and then stretched out leisurely in her rocking chair, her attention drawn to her hummingbirds, watching them as they flittered around the feeders. Folding her hands across her soft ample belly, she said, “You got to make a choice, girl. You got to decide what you gonna do and that’s that.”

That was Miss Willow, always so simple and practical about everything. “Yes, I know, and in time, I will, but right now, I just want the pain to go away. I want to stop hurting, Miss Willow. How do I make the pain go away?”

I waited for her to answer me, to give me some piece of ancient wisdom that would provide a balm cream to my aching, burning heart but she just continued to watch her hummingbirds, amusement lighting up in her eyes and smile. It seemed that she was more interested in them than she was my marital woes. I just sat back in my rocker and closed my eyes, letting the gentle summer breeze caress my face, wondering if my coming here had been a waste of my time. If Miss Willow couldn't help my heartache, then who could?

Finally, after several quiet minutes, Miss Willow spoke. Well, actually, she chuckled and when I looked over at her she nodded toward the hummingbird feeder. “Watch her. Watch the female.”

I watched the tiny bird but didn’t see anything unusual. She was doing the same thing over and over. She was guarding her feeder and every time the male fluttered nearby, she would chase him away.

“If she keeps on doing that, she will starve to death,” Miss Willow chuckled.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she won’t allow the male to come and share the feeder with her, but if she dares to turn her back on him for a moment to take a drink herself, she is afraid he will invade her territory. She is sacrificing her own nourishment in order to keep him away. “

“That’s mighty greedy of her,” I laughed.

“Oh no, that’s pride, my girl.” Miss Willow looked at me, and I could see the love she felt for me in her warm brown eyes. “You see, sometimes, it is pride that hurts us the most.” She nodded to the female hummingbird. “All she got to do is make a choice. Either move on to another feeder, or allow the male to share with her. It don’t matter which choice she makes, so long as she makes one. But, if her pride keeps her from making a choice, she only gonna starve herself.”

He eyes locked with mine. She wasn’t talking about hummingbirds. Well, she was, but she wasn’t. She was talking about me and Jeff, I realized. She was trying to advise me in that subtle, wise manner of her’s. She was giving me the answer I sought from her. I was getting it slowly but surely.

“So,” I spoke softly, “She needs to make a choice to either move on, or allow the male to move in with her. Or, she will just be killing herself.”

Miss Willow’s eyes misted as she nodded lovingly at me. “That’s the way, my girl.”