Sometimes, we have to go home, don’t we?
It’s just necessary, to taste the roasted chicken with creamy potatoes, to smell the lilac bushes which marked the dividing line between our house and our neighbors, to hang upside down on the home-made jungle gym among the apple trees, to climb the willow one more time.
Yet…
This week, home came to me. For all of their glory and splendor, the goldfinches, the state bird of Iowa, have taken over my bird feeders here in Maryland and the large Maple out front and my neighbor’s feeders and their trees.
And our hearts.

“What’s that?” my husband says, over the phone line.
I smile.
“It’s the goldfinches. They’re everywhere.”
“I can hear them,” he says, and I feel his smile from thousands of miles away. “I miss them.”

One thing is certain and I have always known it – the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about…

May Sarton – American poet, novelist and memoirist