The Exotics
“You can see robins,” my mother advised me. “And in the city, sparrows. Look, honey, there’s a robin-red-breast outside right now.”
Into suburban New Jersey, my mother brought her own New England childhood. Robins wore neat “waistcoats” of red, and even Daddy’s English picturebooks showed them; robins lived everywhere civilized. Sparrows did, too; they came with holiness (“They are in the Bible”) and proved even the poor could give crumbs and be appreciated. Bluejays arrived in books and sometimes in real life; cardinals were rare. Avoid crows, which are scary and ominous.
We visited a museum. “I want to see one of these, flying outside,” I insisted. I pointed to a stuffed hummingbird. Even crumpled on an artificial branch, it showed a tropical sparkle.
“Those are rare,” Mom’s hushed voice emphasized solemnly. “We don’t have those.”
We had roses and daisies and forsythia. Soft yellows and cream and white adorned our yard . Our neighbors up the road grew strange plants that my mother didn’t recognize. “They cook with garlic,” she murmured, gently horrified. The neighbors also hung a red feeder of sugared water, for hummingbirds, who are drawn to the color red, they explained. Mom conveyed to me, discreetly, that it was rather sad to see someone hope for a visit from an exotic bird like that. Those feeders might never be visited by the blue-purple-green flashes lifted on tiny fluttering wings. Exotic = We don’t have those here. In the dictionary, exotic = not native to a place.
I moved to Vermont. My mother died, very young, having only once come north to help me set in the vegetable garden. I walked with her ghost along dirt roads, collecting daisies and another plant she knew the name of, Queen Anne’s lace. Most of my country neighbors came in varieties of English and Scottish heritage, with a dash of French Canadian. In those days, a generation ago, kids on the playground still called out “Frenchy!” and “Cooties!” in the same tone of voice.
Someone gave me a geranium. From books and magazines, I knew those plants could live decades. Seeing mine survive its first winter felt like triumph, and belonging: I could become a New Englander, the way Mom had been. Reading The Old Farmer’s Almanac (as well as back issues of Mother Earth News), I studied my environment, raised my first flock of chickens, and learned to make donuts. Wouldn’t my mother love this?
Next spring, I set my geranium with its deep red petal clusters outside the front door, the way my Vermont neighbors did after overwintering their plants. I turned over the garden soil and remembered to plant peas early. Mrs. Poutre explained to me the right way to make chicken pie. My second baby was born in the house in Vermont, a native to the mountains.
Toddler on a blanket, me humming Mom’s old favorites, I dug and hoed. At the slow pace of my curious little boy who gripped my fingers to walk back into the house, we meandered from the garden to the front steps. The toddler let go and pointed to the red-blossomed geranium. A tiny body hung in the air, flitting from flower to flower, sparkling in blue and purple and green. The child saw it before I believed it, because I didn’t expect to see an exotic bird on my own front steps.
It turns out that hummingbirds are not defined as exotic, even in mountainous Vermont. In spite of their capacity to migrate half a world away in winter, they appear wherever there are red flowers. When I look back to Mom’s garden, I know she avoided that too-bright color. But I have become a specialist in planting for red blossoms: geraniums, of course, but also bee balm, a rugged, spreading plant with feathery petals that really do look exotic but turn out to be more common than I realized. Now that I know how to “see” them, I notice them in many neighbors’ gardens.
This morning I sat in the sunshine on the outside steps bef0re starting to write. My shirt, something Mom would not have worn, was bright red and festive. I stood up to head inside, and a tiny feathered bundle of soft brown with bright eyes, a female hummingbird, dashed up to inspect the flash of “petal” color wrapped around me. She hung there for two or three seconds, in front of me, then dashed away to the nearby row of bee balm.
She is not exotic. She belongs here. And thanks to more than 30 winters in the Green Mountains, my own bread and donut recipes, and eyes retrained to look beyond expectations, I can say the same for myself.
But for a moment, in my red shirt, I was the reason for a fabulous miniature “thing with feathers” to pause and wonder. In the aftermath, I feel newly exotic and mysterious, and know my mother was mistaken about many things. I even cook with garlic, in Vermont.
