It's part of the Massachusetts Coastal Lowlands. The local roads wind around rounded hills and weave between small lakes and ponds, the occasional swamp, and countless small streams. To a Seattleite, the area is distinguished by having weather. When it rains, it pours. When it snows, it blizzards. They clear the roads with snow plows there. And every winter, from the first snowfall on, there is snow on the ground until well after the groundhog sees his shadow. By March it's filthy gray dirty snow. There's patches of it everywhere on base, surrounded by thawed areas where brown grass is recovering and trying to turn green again.
The Spring rains of March or April finally melt all the dirty snow. One day in 1955, in March or April, a long rainy period, lasting days, during which I was stuck in the house with my Mother attracting molestation and beatings, there was a sunny day and I could go play outside.Before the rains the dirty snow had been all around, and all the grass was brown. On that day, when I walked out the front door, I was confronted by paradise by comparison, a fresh Eden of green covered by blue skies and billowing cottony clouds.
One minute out the front door, as I stood and gaped at the transformed environment, a male cardinal landed on a branch of a low bush, four feet in front of me. After a short pause he burst into song. Then there was another pause, and he flew off as abruptly as he came.
When he landed on that branch, I was transformed. I recognized that color. I had seen a red bird just that distance before, singing. Not that red bird, and not that song, but the similarity was enough that it woke my soul up and the green became ten times as green, and the red of the bird became fiery and everything in my view glowed.
The cardinal is also my 'aumakua, I found out. The depression eased.
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