Bluebird of happiness

 My husband and I went x country skiing on some of the Bohanan trails this weekend.  It was beautiful.  As we were leaving we saw a bluebird flit through the trees.  A great sighting for the end of our outing.  He just sent me an article by Margaret Renkl from today that was particularly relevant.  An excerpt:

It’s easy to anthropomorphize the wild birds, to see their dramas as parables for our own, but even the most cursory observation allays such thoughts. The birds are hungry, and they eat. They are thirsty, and they drink. They are cold, or wet, or afraid, and they seek shelter. The world is complicated for them, just as it is for us, but they don’t ponder its complexity. They face only that day’s need. Just that one day’s need.

Watching the tumult of their azure wings one morning, I said aloud to the empty house, “A happiness of bluebirds.” I was sure I’d heard the phrase somewhere before. It seemed so apt, the way all the other songbird collectives are apt: a radiance of cardinals, a quarrel of sparrows, a trembling of finches, a scold of jays, a murder of crows. Why not a happiness of bluebirds, for who could fail to take heart from birds who carry the summer sky so faithfully on their backs in the slender light of winter?

Turns out there’s no widely recognized collective noun for bluebirds, at least none that I could find. I had simply made one up out of my own deep, unrecognized need.

And maybe it’s enough in February, in these days that are so close to turning warm and bright and green again, when we are so close to being released from the prison of our homes, to think of happiness as neither distant nor grand. Perhaps it would help to remember that even now happiness is only what it has ever been: something that lights before us, immediate and insistent and always fleeting. Not a promise at all but a temporary gift. It lands, and lifts away, and returns again, ever flashing its wings.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the books “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss” and the forthcoming “Graceland, At Last: And Other Essays From The New York Times.”