My phone’s ditty alerted me to a text.
There it was.
A photo of a robin perched in bare branches, feathers ruffled, body emaciated as a paper clip and eyes blank as buttons – a taxidermist’s nightmare.
“Looooooooooookie here!!!” my son, Jay, texted.
“Noooooo,” my daughter, Molly, responded, along with the weeping face emoji.
“It looks stuffed,” I wrote, dubious.
“Omg! What is Mr. Robin doing here today?” my wife, Tia, said, reflecting the outdoor temperature in the single digits.
“Or dead,” I teased.
“I have a witness if I need to call him in,” Jay wrote. His friend, a second ice fisherman, sat nearby on a turned-over pail.
I pressed for better validation. “We need a video seeing the robin in flight.”
“He is eating Buckthorn berries.” Jay tried to convince us his bird was breathing.
Why all this drama? Well, if you’ve been reading this column for the many decades it’s been in print, you probably know that the Holinger family had a spring tradition started by my mother. The person who saw the first robin migrating north after winter migration south would get the year’s Robin Prize.
Usually, if one of my older brothers or I won it, the prize was a new tie, belt or other piece of apparel my mother thought we needed for dancing school or church. If my father won it – which he most often did because he was the only one who liked to take walks in the cold, early spring months looking for birds – she’d buy him a tie, belt or other piece of apparel my mother thought he needed for his rounds at the hospital.
When we got older, my brothers insisted on something cooler such as the recent Beatles release or the newest style BB gun.
Now the tradition has been picked up by our family and competition is fierce. Prizes usually are gift certificates to favorite stores such as Cabela’s (for Jay), J. McLaughlin (for Tia), Townhouse Books (for me) or my daughter’s favorite bakery or fish store in Buffalo.
The thing is because of climate change, the first robin shows up in back yards sooner and sooner. There may come a day when no time separates “migration” south and a return north; they’ll be here year-round like our goose-pooping friends.
These days, all talk about lake, pond or river ice at a dinner party turns nostalgic. Tia tells the story of her father, as a boy, skating on a Glen Ellyn pond before Thanksgiving. The only ice found on Turkey Days these years chills an old-fashioned.
Rivers, too, once froze solid for months. I remember sledding down tall banks looming above Rock Creek running through my grandfather’s farm in Plano and sliding out onto a glassy, frozen current.
When young, our children skated on the frozen “rink” in the parking lot of Geneva’s Sunset Community Center. Driving by the area over the past few years to work out at the gym for a good 10, 15 minutes, I see only the rough macadam soaking up the sun’s rays like a vacationer hoping for a tan.
Now, in January, what do we get? Rain. Lots of it. Enough to flood our lawn and seep into our basement, sneaking under wood flooring as stealthily as a cat paws under a blanket.
This year, yes, robins arrived earlier than ever. Next year, and the next, and the next, if the world continues to burn, they might never arrive again because there will be nothing left to leave.
• Rick Holinger’s new chapbook of poetry, “Down from the Sycamores,” soon will be available for presale. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Hobart, Chautauqua, Southern Indiana Review and elsewhere. His book of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and collection of essays, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores, Amazon, or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.