A Father's Love

My father and I were very close. I was the baby of the family and he had named me, so when he passed away after a very short illness I was lost and was feeling very much alone. My parents had been married for sixty years. I was a late child and have three older siblings (I am 48 years old).

My father chose to be cremated and as were waiting for extended family members to come back home, I chose to go back to work  for a couple of days until my fathers service. I was not feeling very well after the first couple of hours (STRESS!) I went out back for a smoke to chill just a bit. Now it's a very hot early July forenoon I am sitting out back and I see out of the corner of my eye  what I at  first thought was a dragonfly,but soon realized that what I was seeing was a Hummining bird, so close that I could have reached out with my fully extended arm and touched it. I could not believe my eyes, now hummingbirds are not uncommon in eastern Michigan but they usually need a food source, flowers with nectar or pure nectar (sugar water) anyway something sweet. Now where I am sitting none of these things exist nothing, no plants of any kind that would attract this type of bird yet here it was hovering so close that I could reach out and touched it.

Now my father was an avid feeder of wild birds any wild bird you could think of winter spring did not matter he fed them, he built houses for them, made sure I fed them if he went away for the winter, and so on. Now the only bird that my Dad did not feed was Humming birds he did not have to because he had a trumpet vine at his home, a natural feeder.

To go back to that day, this bird hovered just out of my reach for at least 45 seconds, a long time for a humming bird and then it flew off. I never saw another humming bird out there again but for some reason knew deep in my soul that my Father had came to tell me that he was OK, to let me know that life goes on or that is what It is. My Father never believed in ghosts, what he would tell me that we are all born at a set time and we die at a set time. It's what we choose to do with that time is all up to us. I agree we all have a choice I choose to believe that was my Father saying Goodbye ~ Jamie Ann.

Written by Jamie Hartson, Copyright 2009