A funny happenstance. I went for a walk with a friend to find the beach at Robert’s Memorial Park in Cedar. Walking along, I glanced at the ground and there was an empty robin’s egg! Hard to miss that bright blue amongst the ferns. It wasn’t whole but rather in two sections. I was careful to handle it and it made it home with me that afternoon with a few extra dings.
Later on, I was chatting with my mom on the phone and she started to tell me how she saw her first robin of the year, earlier that very same day I found the egg! I thought, what are the chances that we would both start out our day with a robin story! And then I realized, the chances are good. Of course we would! Whenever there are moments like this, it’s a sure example of when someone you love is with you in some way, and reminders to reach out to each other. The invisible thread of connection to family & friends.
If you know our mom, you’ll understand that she is always on the lookout for robins in the spring. And as soon as she sees one, she lets her kids know that she saw the first one and that winter is now (finally) over. Usually she bursts into song.
“When the red, red robin comes bob, bob bobbin’ along, there’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ his old sweet song…Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead. Get up, get up, get out of bed. Cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red. Live, love, laugh and be happy…”
Growing up in Alberia, aka Alberta, I’m well-versed in the annual ice age; the frigid winters of Edmonton, snow painting the city white, which was always noticeably glimmering magic on the big sky sunny days, where breath lingers in the space ahead of our lips in a puff of poetic cloud as we exclaim each step outdoors, “It’s too damn cold, why do we live here!!!”
Robins, having figured out life as well as their escape routes, leave behind their familiar nests and scatter to the south, turning into snowbirds for those tortuous 6 months. Nomads, they are driven by instinct, necessity, hope, the same forces that move us when we wander away from home. They don’t sing their usual songs in winter, but the travelling calypso tunes. They’re on vacation. They’re never lost. Living life, somewhere hot and exotic with their holiday shirts on but not buttoned up. They are tuned to something deeper, nature’s rhythms, each other, and to something that calls them back when the time is right. Similarly, we eventually leave home. Across landscapes of life, discoveries, heartbreaks, rebirths, we trip, we fall, rise up. Build our nests and hunt our worms. But no matter how far we get, we are still gently tethered by the energy of home, our mother, our parents, our family, our friends, our roots. That connection isn’t always loud. It can be as soft as breath on those blizzard days, yet with as much impact, and as subtle as the warmth in your chest when you remember someone’s voice or the way they belly laugh. These connections are spiritual, energetic, telepathic, intuitive, ancestral… knowing, far beyond what we are aware of, like that sense that someone is thinking of you at the same moment you think of them. When you know that you are held, even from across the Rockies, or the world. The robin knows when to return, she senses the thaw, the shifts in light, the call of familiar soil & the worms beneath. We humans often feel that pull to return home. To reconnect. To remember who we are and where we came from. To see our peeps. Even if “home” has changed. Which it always does. Even if “home” is now a person, a memory, or somewhere we retreat within. The robin’s winter journey isn’t only survival. It mirrors our own paths. We leave, we seek, we adapt, but we never truly lose the thread. We are always connected.
“A Part of Us is Always Connected to Home”
Nature Collage: robin’s egg, birch bark, fern, walnut
Kerstin Bolseng, 2025
See more of the Nature Collage Series here.
