The Last Hummingbird

These small flying jewels still take their cue from the quiet October light, just as they always have.

NASHVILLE — From inside my air-conditioned house, the light through my windows looks the way October light is supposed to look — mild, quiet, entirely unlike the thin light of winter or the sparkling light of spring or the unrelenting light of summer. In normal years, October is a month for open windows in Middle Tennessee. For cool, damp mornings. For colored leaves that quake in the wind before letting go and lifting away. For afternoon shadows so lovely they fill me with a longing I can’t even name.

Relief is on the way, the forecast tells us, but all we have had of autumn so far is the right slant of light, for this year the mild October light has not brought the usual mild temperatures. All over the Southeast, and much of the Midwest, October came in like August, breaking heat records. For all of September it was August in the South, and for all the first week of October, too — severe drought, temperatures near 100 degrees day after day.

My own yard is as drought-tolerant as I can make it, planted with native trees and shrubs that evolved for this growing zone. Hardly a blade of water-craving grass is left in what passes for a lawn here; to my delight, self-seeding wildflowers have gradually crowded out the grass over the years. But the wild ground cover is so dry now that it crackles when I walk on it, and little puffs of dust lift from the parched soil with my every step.

The once-fragrant piles of damp earth that moles turn up in the night are as dry as anthills, and the robins that like to pick through their leavings in the morning seem to have given up all hope of worms. I finally went to the hardware store to buy a sprinkler, partly to save the new berry-bearing trees and shrubs I planted last spring for the songbird migration, and partly because I take so much pleasure from watching all the neighborhood robins darting through the edges of the spray, catching insects desperate for moisture. I know their dance is nothing more than survival, but to me it looks exactly like joy... (Margaret Renkl, continues)