Even when I'm not paying attention,

A dozen years ago, at least, on a walk through a quiet neighborhood near my son’s home in Virginia, Tom stopped. Listen!

I listened.

A jackhammer? I asked. Out here?

Pileated woodpecker, he said. This was early in our marriage, not long after he’d pointed out the woodpeckers in my own backyard. Literally. A year or so before we married, he’d come to dinner and pointed out the birds in my own backyard, including - but not limited to - the woodpeckers. What kind of person doesn’t know who’s living in her own back yard?

Standing in that quiet Virginia morning, listening to the heavy rat-tat-tat, I looked up into the pine trees.

Where is it? , I wondered. I didn’t see awoodpecker. And I wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a jackhammer in the distance.

They’re really elusive, my bird-loving groom told me. I’ve never seen one, but I know that’s what they sound like. They’re big. Really big. They were endangered for a long time, but I think they’re okay now.

Now, at home in the South Carolina Lowcountry, birds are everywhere, and I notice. Herons and egrets, woodstorks and pelicans, even an occasional Roseate Spoonbill. The feeder in the yard is a hot spot for wrens, chickadees, cardinals, blue birds, jays, warblers, and - of course - some little downy woodpeckers. Occasionally, though, I hear the jackhammering of a Pileated woodpecker far away and think of that long-ago morning in Virginia. It’s like living in an aviary here, and I love it, and I love the way it daily connects me to a world Tom loved so enthusiastically.

I pay attention now to the birds. “Consider the birds of the air” says the old text, and I do. I notice in ways I never noticed all those years ago in Dallas. I’ve learned that if I pay attention, I’ll see something lovely or curious or wondrous. Maybe our neighborhood blue heron, the one my neighbor calls Gandalf, eating a little snake. Maybe the skinny baby squirrels zinging around the trunk of the pine tree, or the baby blue bird learning to drink and splash in the bird bath.

There’s so much to see when we pay attention.

But even when I’m not paying attention, of course, it’s all out there, just waiting to dazzle us, and that’s what happened when I glanced out the bedroom window - I was brushing my teeth, not considering the birds of the air - and saw the pair of Pileated woodpeckers in the live oak tree. They were busy tossing twigs and Spanish moss around, and I don’t know - maybe kind of flirting with each other?

I dropped my toothbrush, grabbed my phone, and said out loud - Tom! Pileated woodpeckers!

He’d have been so jazzed to see them. He’d have loved them.

So I’m loving them twice as much, for both of us.