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The Colors of Home - Part 1

© Terrie Murray

"How do you stand all that rain? Don't you get tired of it?"

It wasn't the first time a friend had asked me that since I moved to Oregon, but we in the Pacific Northwest get pretty defensive when people who don't live here comment about our weather. Hey, if we want to make jokes about growing webs between our toes and having skin that rusts instead of tans, that's our right. If someone else pokes fun at us, especially if they have return addresses in California or some other sunny clime, we will tell them that they're welcome to their bold, color-filled lifestyles.

Winters in the Pacific Northwest are made of infinite shades of gray, beginning with sky shimmering silver. The rain blends into the pewter-hued lakes and bays. Green-black mountains appear and disappear through long-fingered shrouds of mist which envelop trees and then let them go again. Damp Douglas fir needles capture the light and reflect it back like thousands of tiny diamonds. Hidden among the dripping trees are coal-black ravens and crows, calling mystically to each other with voices ancient and sage, the essence of the Northwest forests. It is no wonder the Native Americans hold these two birds as sacred totems.

Other birds also are at home in the Northwest winter: the tiny, pilgrim-gray bushtits, flock together to feed on bugs, hanging upside-down from the edges of branches and leaves as weightless as the down of a dandelion. Northern flickers, with black crescent-shaped necklaces brilliant against white breasts speckled with black, their backs a soft brown, tails the color of polished bronze, and red mustaches above long woodpecker beaks. Their voices are like laughter ringing out over the forest. Steller's jays, with feathers startlingly electric-blue against fresh- fallen snow, hunt diligently for acorns and seeds cached during the abundant autumn. Elegant cedar waxwings, with their silky-smooth buff-colored feathers and black-lined eyes, feast on the winter berries of mountain ash and juniper trees. Black-capped chickadees in their tiny gray- and-white tuxedos flutter cheerfully among the ponderosa pines and aspen trees, lighting gracefully on my hand to accept offerings of peanuts. The white tail feathers of the black-hooded dark-eyed juncos flash through the bare branches of alders and oaks. Plain, brown winter wrens which have nothing distinguishing at all about their plumage, sing a bubbly, cheerful trill-of-a- song which can last for up to ten seconds, longer than any other local bird. Red-breasted nuthatches crawl up and down the tree trunks and hang off the ends of evergreen branches, their friendly "yank-yank-yank" calls as familiar to me as the voices of my human friends.