FAMILY CARDINALS

When I was a kid, my mom told me to keep an eye out for cardinals whenever I went out to play in the woods behind our house.

"They look out for us," she told me. "So we need to look out for them, too."

Cardinals hold a very special place in my family, and much of our family folklore centers around them. I'm reminded of this whenever I go back to Maryland to visit my mom — you can't find cardinals in Los Angeles, they don't make it this far west.

My mom keeps porcelain statuettes of them on shelves and tabletops around the house. She has cardinal coffee mugs, picture frames decorated with cardinals, even cardinal-themed oven mitts. At Christmas, cardinal ornaments overwhelm the tree.

They brighten up her house in much the same way the real birds can appear as a bloom of crimson on a snowy winter's day.

* * *

My mom inherited her name, Mary, from her mother, and her love of cardinals from her father, John Collins.

Grandpa John served in the army during World War II. He received a Purple Heart and Silver Star for storming a fortified hillside to hurl a grenade into a Nazi pillbox. After the war, he returned to Virginia, where he met his wife, Mary, and started a family.

John and Mary were Irish Catholic, and they brought their children up in the Church. The family always had a particular fondness for saints and guardian angels. They were always looking for symbols of their faith in their lives — signs of divine presence in the world around them.

Grandpa John was also an amateur naturalist and a history buff, and he loved the cardinal because it was the state bird of Virginia — never mind the fact that it's also the state bird of five other states. He would always point the birds out to his kids when they appeared in the yard. At some point, my mom and her siblings came to believe that cardinals were the guardian angels of the Collins family.

I never met my grandmother Mary. She died of pancreatic cancer when my mom was eleven years old.

According to my mom, the week after her mother's funeral, a female cardinal flew up and perched right outside the dining room while the family was eating breakfast. The bird seemed to be peering in through the window, watching over my mom and her siblings as they ate. My grandfather noticed, and as he pointed the bird out to his kids, it began to sing — its syrupy call inserting itself into the conversation like my grandmother used to do.

Eventually, my grandfather remarried. His new wife, Alice, was squat in appearance and cranky in demeanor. She took on the job of parenting my mother and her siblings as best she could.

So now there was Grandpa John and Grandma Alice in the house — and a cardinal that acted suspiciously like Grandma Mary living in the backyard.

Fast-forward a few decades. I was in elementary school. Grandpa John got sick. Mom, being a nurse, could tell that he wasn't going to get better.

A few days after Grandpa John died, a pair of cardinals showed up at the feeder we had hanging in our backyard.

We'd often hear them calling before they appeared. They'd come in from the forest to the bushes at the edge of the lawn and survey the house. Then, in stuttered flight, they'd swoop across the yard. The cardinals would take turns at the feeder, one perching to eat while the other hopped around the ground below.

My mom liked to believe — we all liked to believe — that it was Grandpa John and Grandma Mary, reunited as cardinals in the afterlife.

Grandma Alice never remarried, and became less cranky with age. I loved spending time with her, and we used to sit and talk for hours. Actually, let me rephrase that: I would talk for hours, and she would smile and nod. She said she didn't believe in hearing aids, and I don't think she could hear a word I said.

Halfway through my freshman year of college, Grandma Alice passed away.

Back home in Virginia, the same pair of cardinals that had appeared when Grandpa John died was still coming around — they were still regulars at the feeder. Or at least we thought they were the same birds. The male had an especially dark mask, and the female's crest was a bright red — brighter than I'd seen on other birds.

The morning after Alice's funeral — as we were standing in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do with all the leftover food from the memorial reception — a new cardinal appeared. It was another female, and it sat at the feeder alongside the original pair.

This bird was different from the others. She was squat and a little drab, and even appeared cranky, becoming aggressive with birds twice her size when they came too close to her food.

So, naturally, we concluded, these cardinals were Grandpa John, Grandma Mary, and Grandma Alice.

It was fun to imagine that our loved ones had embodied birds so they could come back and look after us. But we never took the cardinal symbolism that seriously. I'm not a superstitious person, and for my sister and me, the cardinals were just a coincidence: coincidences happen.

* * *

If you pressed me, though, I do have a cardinal story of my own.

It was the winter before I graduated from college. I was driving back to Pittsburgh from Virginia, where I'd spent the holidays with my family. The whole world was gray outside, and it was beginning to snow.

Despite the weather, I was booking it back to the 'Burgh. I was making my way up a long hill when a glint of red came out of the trees along the highway. I could just make out the cardinal through the snow, flapping its way across the road in front of my car.

I slowed and changed lanes to avoid hitting the bird, and as I did, the back tire of an eighteen-wheeler directly in front of me blew out. The truck swerved violently into the other lane, right where I'd been seconds before. If I hadn't hit the brakes to avoid that cardinal, the truck would've crushed me.

A few years later I mentioned what had happened to my mom. She just smiled and nodded. "These things happen," she said.

* * *

When I was in elementary school, my mom got sick. Really sick. Nobody could figure out what was wrong. She went to a bunch of different specialists, but they all struggled to diagnose her illness. In the meantime, she was told to rest and drink plenty of fluids.

She spent weeks in bed, exhausted. Moving hurt. Talking hurt. She would break out in rashes whenever she went out in the sun. And then the rash would be replaced by a fever and her joints would swell up. More doctors' appointments, spinal taps, and blood tests all came back...