The Traveling Kind
This past winter when I settled into the kitchen for the afternoon to make a pot of soup or batch of beans, I usually asked Alexa to play selections by Emmylou Harris, whose music is always good company over the stove or on the road. I could sing along to most of the tunes, but the title track from The Traveling Kind, Harris’s collaboration with Rodney Crowell, was a new discovery. A remembrance of songwriters past, its words and melody soaked into me over the course of several weeks.
We don’t all die young to save our spark
From the ravages of time
But the first and last to leave their mark
Someday become the traveling kind.
During those short days of winter, I was also taking a lot of walks through Rock Creek Park. In the months prior, most of my visits to the park were for runs rather than walks, but as the natural world slowed down, so did I. Over the two winters of COVID, I discovered a deeper appreciation for woods stripped bare of greenery and full of light, and I welcomed opportunities to linger on the paths.
Along one small section of brushy woods, I began to see a pair of cardinals on most every visit. Each time Lola and I made our way down the small ridge into this area, I hoped for a sighting of one or both. While cardinals are not rare, they are uncommon in my neighborhood, and I’m always happy to catch sight of their bright plumage.
After a few sightings, these two friends began to take on special meaning. Cardinals are said to be messengers from departed loved ones, and each time I saw them fluttering about in the underbrush or calling from a high tree branch, I thought of my mom and my beloved friend Mark — the two travelers closest to my heart.
In the wind are names of poets past
Some were friends of yours and mine
And to those unsung, we lift our glass
May their songs become the traveling kind
While neither Mark nor my mom were songwriters, I began to hear the songs they wrote for me as I walked among the tress. Mark, the diehard street activist, wrote his as we sat enjoying an afternoon picnic in the Spanish countryside a few months before he died. Amidst rolling hillsides and a spread of wine and cheese, he encouraged me to seek out and savor life’s sweet moments, just like the one we were sharing, because “in the end that’s what really matters.” My mother, on the other hand, wrote a song for me over the course of thirty plus years. When it comes to mind, I hear the well-known words from the Apostle Paul: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”
Too often in the midst of life’s busyness and my own fear and anxieties, I forget to listen and live by these tunes that speak so directly to my heart. But over these past months, the cardinals continued to call me back. As the season turned from winter to spring, each outing along those familiar trails became a reminder that, just as I know where to find the cardinals, I also know how to listen to the songs given to me. Like the cardinals, they are always in the air. I just need to take the time and the effort to listen.
As the bright greens of spring now give way to the long days of summer, my visits to the park again include runs and walks. Some days I make it to the woods to a catch glimpse of “my” two cardinals and on others I run past, but sighted or not, I know the cardinals are there, singing the songs I need to hear.
And the song goes on for the traveling kind.
