Spring returns with birdsong and melting snow, but for Max, the season carries more than new beginnings. Armed with her camera and a childhood tradition, she heads down the old country road in search of the elusive red-winged blackbird — and finds herself face-to-face with memories she’s spent years trying to frame.
Wouldn’t You Like To Be a Redwinged Blackbird? is a story about friendship, grief, and the way certain moments only appear when the light hits just right. It’s tender, a little sharp, and rooted in Midwest springtime.
The snow melted slowly, leaving blotchy patches of white in the yard and along the ditches. Green grass struggled to find its breath, and the noise of happy spring birds returned. Max grabbed her Nikon and ventured outside. It was early, but hearing the chirps outside her window this afternoon sparked Max into action. She'd been editing photos for her show far too long and needed to stretch.
She hung the camera around her neck and took in the sweet smell of fresh spring. She loved working from home. And home was five miles from the nearest neighbor in all directions. A wooded ravine bordered her property on one side, farmland bordered the others. She wished Marie could take part in the springtime contest like she did when they were children.
She started down the country road, her boots clacking gently on the pavement. Max smiled as she remembered a similar stretch of country road that separated her house from her best friend’s, about a half-mile stretch with a couple of curves. The girls had worn out a path to the side of the ditch running back and forth.
A sparrow lighted atop a rugged fence post and Max raised the Nikon, but the creature took flight before she could get the shot. She let the camera fall to her chest and kept walking.
Max’s mother had thought up the contest one spring afternoon when she and Marie had broken the table lamp while trying to pitch a tent indoors with blankets and jump ropes. Mom had had enough and figured she’d be money ahead with ten one-dollar bills and a brand new game if the girls just went outside. A few years later, Marie would tell Max that her mom must be a genius to be able to come up with something so grand.
The rules had been simple. Each girl started with five dollars. The first one to spot a robin earned a dollar from the other girl. The first one to spy a rainbow—and not one from the garden hose, but a God-given rainbow in the sky—earned a dollar from the other one. Same thing for the first butterfly, toadstool and wildflower.
The girls’ eyes had bugged and their jaws dropped as they counted their money.
“Well, get on now. You can’t find these things sitting in here.”
“But what if we can’t find all these today? What then?” Marie asked.
Mom smiled and said, “It may take you more than one day. Especially the rainbow. That one might be difficult.”
“What if she finds something when I’m not around? How will I know she’s not fibbin’?”
“Marie, does your mom have a Polaroid?” Marie nodded as she laid her dollars out side by side on the old kitchen table.
“Well, if you’re apart, you’ll have to take a photo and put a date on it and then settle up later.” She brushed the stringy brown hair from Max’s face. “My camera’s in the closet. You’re welcome to use it, but just for the game, okay?”
Max nodded. Marie squealed and the girls were off. They’d been six years old.
Max looked down at her Nikon with all the bells and whistles of modern digital photography. She wished she still had Mom’s old Polaroid. She wished she still had a lot of things.
A tractor rumbled toward her, and she hopped over the ditch to allow it room to pass. Dave waved down to her and she waved back. She aimed the camera at the rear of the tractor and caught a decent stylistic shot. She’d have to edit out the telephone lines and blur out the license plate. The shot would be a perfect fit for the photography scholarship fundraiser in New York this weekend.
She continued, looking for that first robin. That first wildflower. Anything from the list that she could add to her personal gallery wall.
The gallery had been Marie’s idea, about five years into the game. In Marie’s basement, her parents allowed her to hang framed photos from that spring’s contest. Purple frames represented Max’s wins, and pink frames represented Marie’s.
The girls bored of the original list after the first couple of years, so they added items of their own. First tree bud. First dragonfly. First strawberry.
The caveat, at that point, was they’d have to fund anything above five dollars each with their own money. Mom wasn’t about to fund a list of one hundred items. And the thing was, it wasn’t even about the money. They did it for the thrill, and each season the girls ended up even anyway.
By the time they were twelve, it was all about the photos.
Each girl asked for nicer cameras for birthdays and extra rolls of film for their Christmas stockings. Each year, their parents obliged. The pair were even elected as school photographers in sixth grade, attending ball games and award ceremonies for the school. They sent their photos to the local newspaper for a dollar apiece. Those dollars helped fund the next hunt.
A passing car with dual exhaust startled Max from her thoughts. After the gush of wind and dust that followed the intrusion settled, she decided to cross the fence line—Dave told her she could do so any time so long as it was before the field was planted—and sit with her side against one of the posts. The ground was cold and damp, and it soaked her jeans, but the perfect shot was worth a little discomfort.
From her view on the ground, she could focus the Nikon on the long, rugged fence line and hope for another bird shot. Hopefully, a red-winged blackbird. She didn’t want to settle for a robin.
When the girls reached middle school, their list had become so specific that Max lost track of who’d added which species. The robin was still on the list, but the girls had added ten other birds along with Queen Anne’s Lace and Sweet Rocket wildflowers that lined the ditches of their Midwest home.
The red-winged blackbird was Marie’s favorite. Max would never forget that conversation.
“Wouldn’t you like to be one?” Marie asked one day as they picked up their developed film from the drug store down the road from the school.
“Be one what?” Max was flipping through the photos of the basketball tournament to find the nature shots she’d taken earlier that week.
“Wouldn’t you like to be a red-winged blackbird?” Marie handed Max a shot of the bird she’d taken two days ago—with one shot left on her roll of thirty-five millimeter. Max was shocked. It took her five or six tries with the birds before she got a photo that good.
“Wow, that’s amazing!” The bird had landed on the school’s stone nameplate at the front entrance. Marie hadn’t gotten any of the lettering in the shot, and the background was blurred enough so you couldn’t easily tell where it was taken. The bird’s ebony feathers had a slight purple sheen, and its shoulder boasted a scarlet patch trimmed with a slender line of bright white.
“I’d like to be one for a day. To fly. I know the girl ones are brown and dull, but I’d like to fly and have that fiery red flame come from my shoulders.” Marie gazed at the photo and tucked it back into her packet.
“You should send that one in.”
Marie grinned and nodded. “I think I might.”
Their photos became more and more impressive and both girls entered and won junior photography contests. Marie’s red-winged took grand prize at the state fair. Sleek black and silver frames gradually replaced the pinks and purples in Marie’s basement, and only the best of the best made it onto the wall.
Max adjusted her position and held up the camera toward the fence line as a bird, too far away to identify, floated in the breeze above her head. Sitting this still on the ground was always a challenge, and with age, it was becoming more of one.
She fought back tears, not from the pain in her lower back, but from the emptiness in her heart as she remembered that last spring with Marie.
The girls had been at Max’s house in the backyard, taking photographs of the beige toadstools that popped up near the pine trees each spring. Marie spotted them first, but both took different shots. Different angles. Different lighting. Lying smack on the ground, noses and camera lenses inches from the fungus.
Marie rolled over on her back in the grass after the photo shoot.
Max mirrored her, their heads together, looking up at the graying sky to the west.
“Betcha there’ll be a rainbow soon.”
“Maybe. Not much light left though, and I’ve gotta get home soon to study for that dumb history quiz.” Marie sat up, and put her camera back into its case.
“Okay. See ya tomorrow.” Max remained in the grass, watching the clouds.
Marie stood and brushed off her jeans. “See ya.”
That was the last time the girls spoke.
The bird swooping above Max’s head was a crow. That figures. Sometimes you see what you want to see. But the camera never lies. She swung around to face the opposite direction. The light was better from that angle and her right shoulder was numb from the post and needed a break.
From this vantage point, Max had the wooded area near her home in the frame, and a few fence posts. Several more birds of varying sizes were still too far off to capture or identify. She held up her camera, waited patiently, and allowed anniversary memories to sweep over her.
Max had walked in the back door when her mom called her out the front door. Max set her camera down and went through the house to the porch. It had started to sprinkle, and Max thought about retrieving her camera to catch that rogue rainbow, but something in her mom’s voice gave her pause.
Mom pointed down the road to the curve about an eighth of a mile past their house. The blind curve that the girls had been warned about since they were little. The curve that caused them to walk in the ditch, wearing out that path between their homes. The curve that all the locals knew to approach with caution. And most of them knew that the two little girls frequented that part of the road.
A couple of cars had stopped, and the people were exiting their vehicles. Max took off running. Rain fell a little harder, soaking her shoulders.
A white pickup truck was off in the ditch, rear passenger tire still spinning slowly in mid-air.
She saw Marie’s camera, out of the case, busted on the pavement. Then, around the bend in the road, she saw Marie’s boots, then her legs, then her whole form.
Max fell to the road next to her friend in the pouring rain.
“I didn’t see her. I just didn’t see her. She was right there in the middle…” The driver was babbling and disoriented.
Marie didn’t move. Max laid her head on Marie’s chest and couldn’t hear a heartbeat. She couldn’t feel her chest rise and fall.
Max stayed in that position until her mother pulled her away so Marie’s parents could come near. Max stumbled backward to the middle of the road and cried up to the sky. The rain had slowed and the evening sunlight cast just the right angle...
And then Max knew.
From the middle of the road, in the middle of the blind spot, was the perfect shot. Framed by trees on each side. No power lines. Perfect light.
Marie had found spring’s first rainbow.
#
Max gave up the wait. She had several more hours of editing for the show this weekend. She stood slowly, letting the cramps work out of her legs and back. She stepped over the ditch and onto the road when something fluttered in the corner of her eye. On the post she had leaned against for the last hour was a perfect, glossy red-winged blackbird.
Slowly the Nikon came up to her face. Slowly she focused. Slowly she moved her finger to the shutter release.
A gallery-worthy photo.
A Marie Hawkins Photography Scholarship piece.
And she got it with one click.
