To Ease the Passing of Time

They have been here with us since we arrived at the cottage at the end of May. They fly around us all day, and they don’t stop flapping their wings even when they are drinking the nectar from the flowers or the sugary water that Maria leaves outside for them every day. In a month or so, sometimes in the middle of September, we’ll get up one day, and they will be gone. It will be a sign that summer is over and that it’s time for us to start thinking about packing up our things and go back to town with the cats.

Every year, at the end of the summer, hummingbirds fly all the way from Canada to Mexico, about 4000 km. Those tiny little birds are able to fly up to 800 km a day. Some of them won’t make it to Mexico. They will die on the way in storms or from exhaustion. Others will make it but won’t come back. They will die from old age in Mexico, or they will just be too weak to fly back to Canada. And there are some hummingbirds that will be here again with us next summer. They will find their way back to our garden at the cottage without a GPS. We don’t know which ones are the ones that were here with us last year and which ones are the new ones. We just know that life goes on and that hummingbirds have been living here for a long, long time.

We also know that one year we will leave the cottage at the end of the summer for the last time; like some of the hummingbirds that fly to Mexico for the winter, we won’t return. We will be too old and too weak to pack up our things and drive our car towards our little paradise by the river at the beginning of the summer. The cottage will be sold and other people will live here among the flowers, the butterflies and the hummingbirds.

Some people believe that our souls never die. Maybe, many years from now, there will be something left of our souls in this place, something in the gentle breeze that carries the scent of the blowers, and something in the humming sound made by the wings of those tiny little birds that will tell the story of the love we shared, and that will echo the many times we laughed together when hummingbirds were flying around us like little angels.