Sugar Water, Riverside

 Hummingbirds come and go through the summers.  Hot reds and hot greens zero in on their feeders.  Doris fills more than one, more than two, having sugar water and red food dyes enough for dozens.  Every hummer that comes is the first one for the day, every day is filled with firsts, every day is the same as the last. 

Two skinny cypress trees frame Doris’s window.  Star jasmine climbs and covers the cypress completely, makes an arch just under the eaves, connects one cypress tree with the other.  The feeders hang off these vines and the hummers circle and sip. 

Sharon uses a step stool to remove the feeders so Doris can fill them.  “Joe usually does this,” Doris chortles.  Doris does not say Joe’s name without happy places in the utterance, as if there is an encoded giggle between the J and the O and the E.  We hear it and smile; Sharon, the hospice caregiver, smiles; Ernesto next door, who raises chickens in a yard too small to raise chickens and who cannot speak any English, he smiles, too, when he hears Doris say “Joe” and nods Bueno! to the overcrowded hens.  

One night we hear the rattle inside him.   

We hear that rattle inside him.  We hear and it makes us shake and turn our faces away.  When we look back . . . 

But we don’t look back.  No use in that.  Joe was gone.  “Joe is gone,” we tell Doris. 

Over three months pass.  Nobody remembers the funeral hearse that took Joe away after the night hospice nurse pronounced.  Joe was gone.  Joe was gone.  Every day we tell Doris.  She bends her head toward the window.  The feeders are more than half full.  “The first one will be here any minute.”   

“Joe is gone,” we tell her.   

“Any minute now, the first one will show up.”   

“JOE IS GONE, Doris!” 

Her cane drops away.  Her gnarled hand finds her mouth.  Her eyes fill . . . “Not Joe?” Doris says; there is no happy place in her saying his name—but that will change. 

That girl in the navy blue flowers, that girl wearing eighty-odd years.  She stands and holds the lip of the deep sink.  She stands and watches the hummers diving for food, her ears not hearing us.  There are hours when we want to be her not hearing us, lost in a year of days when bad news is like a draft at a shaky window and a towel situated just so makes the draft go away and we are all warm again and can’t remember why a towel should be planted there, on that sill, where the feeders hang empty through winter—to us. 

Not to Doris. 

To Doris, ruby-breasted warriors vie for her red nectar, come and go, all day, every day, and every hummer that comes is the first one.  “Joe! Joe!  Come look!”