Her Little Ways: That quiet whisper

Not every special moment in my time Marcie was some gigantic occasion or breakthrough event. My tendency, I believe, is always to reflect on those things I know were grand and now will simply not be. But I often miss, as I have noted, the little things she did even more.

If our love was a house and the pillars of it built by her included her charity, her ferocity, her wit and her tender ministrations, then her ways with me carved intricate inlays and myriad baroque embellishments on them. One of them I miss is the quiet, beckoning whisper.

Marcie appreciated simple moments of beauty or joy in the everyday. She also loved to share them when she could.

I shared her appreciation. However, I was always focused on a project or a plan and not often aware of them. I could also be prickly when suddenly barged in on and interrupted. But Marcie learned to get around it.

"Honey..." she would whisper. "Honey, come look at this..."

I could judge what it was by the look on her face and the tone of her voice. Something cute meant she would say it with a rising voice at the end, with mischievous cuteness being marked with a knowing half-chuckle. Her eyes would roll.

If it involved something that could be ruined by too much noise, she would whisper her entreaty with a little falloff in volume at the end and a gentle shush. "Honey, come look at this... shh... quietly."

She would hold my hand or continuously crook her finger, turning, as she crept on her target, sometime a bird on the porch, or Seamus busily working on solving a locked door or a closed box of food. Sometimes it was a wild animal.

Those little words were soon used to interrupt her reading as I became more accustomed to, and attuned to, the same kind of appreciation. She too could suffer from tunnel-vision and a laserlike focus, especially with a new tome.

There were many little moments we enjoyed and shared because of that quiet beckoning.

It was just such a call that drew my attention to a pair of doves nesting in our porch plant on Suncrest Drive. It also brought me a view of a vole enjoying out birdseed and porch in Humboldt.

I cannot count the number of times that we sneaked up on Seamus in the throes of some deviltry, one or the other noticing his cleverness being turned to his whims or wants.

"Honey, come look at this..."

I miss those little words. But this weekend, while I was focused on some online work and paying bills, I felt that weird tingle on my neck I got when she would open my door and wait.

"Honey, come look at this..."

I did not hear the words or see her or anything so direct as much as I was acting on habit. I stood up from the chair I use for the computer desk and quietly walked to the back room, wondering what was going on.

Then I saw.

Seamus was inside a window between the glass and the screen at the back of the house. A few inches away, on the other side of the screen, was a green hummingbird, twittering and peeping at him, hovering.

Seamus chittered at the bird through a mouth full of slobber and the screen, eyes no doubt wide and pupils dilated.

He did not notice me, and I quietly backed out of the room, as she likely would have, not wanting to interfere with his moment. I walked into the bedroom before I realized what I was doing.

All I wanted to say was, quietly, "Honey, come look at this..."

So I did. But who was showing what to whom I can't say.