Kaila Lancaster

On Hummingbirds, Food, and the Body

The young ruby-throated hummingbird weighs less than a nickel, a mere breath of body, bone, beak. Though small, she’s always hungry—ravenous, feeding every ten to fifteen minutes. She consumes the nectar from garden flowers or the sugar water warm from feeders or mosquitos thick with blood. She’s new to the world, hatched just one month ago. But hummingbirds only have a month to grow up. No longer under the care of her mother, she’s solely responsible for her life, her hunger. She flies through the thick heat of summer like a bullet-bird. Her wings beat fifty-three times per second, faster than any other bird wings in the world. Perhaps she finds delight in this fact. As she flies to find her next meal, perhaps she’s bolstered by the marvel of her wing speed, or proud of her ability to maneuver sideways and backwards, up and down.

 She has a favorite feeder, or at least a feeder she frequents. Bright red, solid glass, full of sugar water that tastes just right. The hummingbird visits throughout the day and drinks until a male, chittering, chases her away. 

As the hummingbird has her fill, a woman watches behind the glass of a window. This woman fills the feeder every few days and takes care to clean the glass of any grime and keep the sugar-to-water ratio perfect. She loves the hummingbird and could watch her and other hummers for hours. And sometimes she does—she’ll sit cross-legged on the rug beside the back window, a perfect view of her porch and her apartment’s grove of trees and the feeder hung on a shepherd’s hook. She kills time or procrastinates by bearing witness to a parade of sun gems. 

You see, the woman was a hummingbird, too, when she was new in the world. As a ginger-haired baby, her grandparents nicknamed the woman “Kai-Bird” for her habit of gaping her mouth and craning her neck when she wanted more spoonfuls of baby-mush. She was a hummer too as a tween and teen, lean and muscled and always hungry, ravenous, an athlete flying fast from one practice or race or game to the next. And, like a good hummingbird, her diet was limited to a few foods— grilled cheeses, noodles with olive oil and dried parmesan and basil, turkey sandwiches, or cheese quesadillas. A texture girl, the woman’s diet was limited by her own preference, not by lack or instinct. The woman knows now what a  privilege it is to eat the foods you want when you want them. But as a girl, her choices felt vital. Once, a pickle was placed on her tongue in kindergarten as she sat blindfolded in front of the class—a lesson on the five senses. She was supposed to guess the food but she could not guess because she had never had a pickle before. The taste and texture were awful—too tangy, too crunchy, too juicy. She gagged and rubbed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and goose-pimples erupted from her arms and thighs. 

In short, a hummingbird needs no pickles—or vegetables or sauces or pulpy fruits—and neither did the woman as a girl.  

The hummingbird doesn’t recognize the window woman as a fellow hummingbird, because of course she is not a hummingbird. She is a woman, a human, who simply sees—or wants to see—herself in the hummers that visit her feeder. The hummingbird is too busy following her hunger to give the woman the time of day. The hummer must stay ahead of her metabolism—a metabolism seventy-seven times faster than the window woman’s—so she can simply stay alive.

*

The hummingbird doesn’t socialize with other hummingbirds. This is customary. Hummers are solitary, living and eating and flying alone all their lives. Despite the internet dubbing a hummingbird flock a “glitter” or “shimmer” or “tune,” the hummingbird knows no flock and will never know a flock, at least not in the way humans think of flocks, like murmuring clouds of starlings or neat triangles of geese. The hummingbird will have no long-term partnerships or friendships, mating as quickly as possible and raising young alone. Most of the year, she’ll chase or be chased by other hummingbirds at feeders and flowers, chastise or be chastised by angry squeaks. The hummingbird is fiercely competitive, territorial, and she does not see other hummers as friends. 

Sometimes, though, hummingbirds will eat together, getting along according to temporary truces—during migration time, or before or during bad weather. The window woman found a video once of what looked like hundreds of hummers gathered at several feeders in Rockport, Texas, just a week after a hurricane devastated the area’s trees and plants: Ruby Throated Hummingbirds Rockport TX by Rhonda Cantu. In the video, the hummingbirds gather in their glitter or shimmer or tune, landing to drink from the feeders at least ten at a time. The hum of wings and the awed breaths of the videographer soundtrack the clip. The window woman understands the awe of who she assumes is Rhonda Cantu, the YouTube user. She feels it often when watching hummingbirds, but especially felt it one late spring day, when tornadoes were predicted for the evening. The window woman watched as two males—sworn enemies the day before—cordially shared the feeder all morning and afternoon. She couldn’t help but take dozens of photos of the pair, perched calmly together on opposite ends of her feeder. The hummers drank their fill and lazily perched for extended moments, unusually unhurried. She could only guess they sensed the coming storms somehow. The birds’ behavior made the woman nervous. Did the hummers sense disaster, enough to put aside whatever instinct informs their sought solitude? 

That’s why humans forgo solitude, too, isn’t it? To thwart the disaster of loneliness? 

The window woman sought athletic teams as a girl, teen, and young adult as a remedy for unwanted solitude. Or—the solitude wasn’t really the problem, as the woman cherished and still cherishes alone time. It was the un-belonging she feared. In her youth, she became part of flocks of other athletes, especially volleyball teams, a sport at which she excelled. She never wholly fit into these flocks—or, if not fit in, she never quite knew what to do in the flocks off of the volleyball court. But she loved being part of the team on the court, in the gym. The gym had rules she understood, rhythms that etched themselves onto her bones—pre-practice small talk, warm-up gossip, the automatic chatter of the game itself, and the post-practice communal chug of chocolate milk. But outside of volleyball—at parties, hangouts, the like—she never quite understood what was expected of her, never quite felt at ease. She mostly hung back, observed the going-ons, or volunteered her services as designated driver. 

In college, the volleyball flock most readily extended itself, at least in ways the woman understood and felt part, during pre and post-practice/games meals. There was a freedom with food that came with dining with her volleyball teammates, most of the time. Something special. The woman paid attention to what she ate then—the weight room coach’s weekly weigh-ins demanded it—but she loved post-practice meals in the Caf, looked forward to loading her plate with pasta salad and boiled eggs and turkey sandwiches and slim slices of pizza, washing it all down with a glass of ice-less Powerade. In the Caf, everyone on her team was hungry. Everyone ate. No one said anything about a full plate because everyone’s plate was full. 

Different flocks of athletes weren’t necessarily like this, the woman knows. She remembers now the soccer athletes in that same Caf. The volleyball and soccer athletes were often the last of the student body in that bright room that felt like home, all sweaty from practice, all taped with ice on sore spots. The woman still remembers the squeeze of Saran wrap around her abdomen and the sting of ice on her lower back.

The soccer girls’ plates were full, yes, but now the woman understands there were unspoken rules among those athletes—a plate of food had to have a sister plate of greens, of veggies, of a meticulously-constructed salad. The soccer athletes didn’t get seconds. Their plastic Caf cups were mostly full of ice-less water, not bright blue Powerade. The woman took notice of their bodies, too. Varied, yes, but more homogenous than her own team’s. Sturdy, muscular legs. Small waists. Decidedly athletic. 

After volleyball, years after her athlete body had all but melted into softness and bloomed fuller, meals with colleagues or friends weren’t quite as easy.  How the woman ate was routinely seen as an oddity, a way to fan a conversation into flame. The college athletes the woman tutored balked, You’ve never had an orange?  Colleagues laughed, How are you alive right now? At the bar, a friend’s friend gestured to the woman’s Diet Coke and asked, You’re not drinking? The women fed the flame, too, joked about her picky taste buds. I have the palate of a five-year-old, she’d say. Or she made excuses for her plain plate, her alcohol-free beverage. I’m allergic, she’d lie. Or: I don’t like alcohol. Most of the time, these comments didn’t bother the woman. She could laugh at herself when the mood was there. Think nothing of it. 

But sometimes the woman was sick of it. Sick of being in on the joke. Sometimes she wanted to ask, What does it matter? Why do you care? 

Once a couple of years ago, in a conversation with work friends about food over food, there arose a comment about the woman’s selective way of eating: Her diet’s the worst of us. The woman can’t remember exactly if the pronoun at the beginning of the sentence was in the third or second person—was it Her diet’s the worst of us or Your diet’s the worst of us? For the woman, the memory is in the third person, the comment addressed to the group and not her. The woman doesn’t remember what she said or did in response—the conversation’s minutiae is lost to her now. She was probably in on the joke, perhaps even instigated the comment, as she often did—My palate is like a five-year-old’s. All she knows is that she didn’t want this comment to bother her so much. But it bothered her so much. The woman understands now that the word “worst” was what made her quiet, made a sour mood simmer for the rest of the day, made her mother ask, “What’s wrong?” over the phone when she sensed the mood, and made shameful, childlike tears well and spill as the woman confessed being bothered. Worst. How she feeds herself, she thought, was deemed worst, wrong, bad, not good. The woman’s inner child, her inner Kai-Bird, desperate to not be perceived as the worst at anything, to be at best the best and at worst good at everything, curled herself small as a hatchling in the corner of the woman’s chest. 

*

I am one of the lightest birds in the sky. This is how Sy Montgomery’s children’s book Brave Baby Hummingbird begins. The hummingbird does not think this as she flies, because she probably doesn’t compare herself to other birds, as she is consumed instead with staying alive. The woman wonders if the hummer even notices other birds at all—the soaring, lean bulk of Mississippi kites, the puffed breasts of perched mourning doves, or the slow meander of hunky turkey vultures. But if the hummer did compare herself to other birds, she might like to think of herself as one of the lightest birds in the sky, a mantra to give her a sort of solace. Or maybe this is the human way of things, to place value on a “light” body. The woman wants to believe she is immune to human ways of things, but of course she’s not. To be smaller—lighter, leaner, lesser—was better. Is better, if the woman is honest with herself about her own body. But she tries to fight this ingrained belief. You see, the woman is trying to make peace with her body now, as it’s not the body of the former self she knew best—her athlete self. And maybe her athlete self—her thinner body—was not the body she knew best. She absolutely knows her body now: the lumps around her hips webbed with milk-white stretch marks, or the explosion of freckles over her arms in the summer. But she believes her athlete body, her lighter body, was most valued. This belief, no doubt, has been learned. She remembers an afternoon as a teen watching college volleyball with her dad. They were watching warmups, and the woman was in her element, daydreaming of her future, when her dad interrupted. 

“Our girls don’t look like they’re in good shape,” he said. He gestured to an athlete on the home team, warming up with her partner. In spots, the athlete’s thighs dimpled with cellulite, and her stomach protruded just barely over the waistband of her spandex. 

“Look at them.” Her dad pointed to the team in red: tall athletes. Thin, muscular, young women with long legs. “They’re in better shape. They take care of their fitness,” he said. “You have to take care of your fitness if you want to play at the next level.” At that he leaned back, placing an ankle on a knee. His tiny tiger paw tattoo was a sickly green against pale skin.  

Lesson learned.

 As an athlete, the woman was not necessarily the lightest, but she was smaller than she realized, despite her voracious appetite—inhaling cheese pizzas after the athletics period at school, not even half-worried if the meal would mess with her abilities at practice later that day; or chewing two double cheeseburgers, fries, and slurping an orange Hi-C from McDonalds after hours of play at national volleyball tournaments. The woman goes through old photos from this time and cannot believe the body that metabolized these meals. Hers were like the bodies she wanted at the time, bodies of athletes she idolized. Even at her heaviest athlete self during her senior year of college, she was easily identified as athlete. There’s a photo that hangs above her desk in her childhood bedroom, huge and matted in navy blue and bordered with messages written in silver Sharpie by her teammates and coaches. A senior night gift. The woman is mid-play in the photo, passing the ball during serve receive. She bends her knees, is light on her toes, and her calf muscles flex, sheened in sweat. Her thighs are thick but firm—there’s a line of muscle separating hamstring and quad that the woman used to stroke to remind herself she was made of muscle—and her arms, extended in textbook form, bulge gently beneath her jersey. She hinges at the waist, and her stomach goes concave. 

The woman didn’t realize she lived in such a body at the time. She was always trying to make her body more athlete. Read: smaller and more muscular. Mostly her attempts meant more exercise, but she wasn’t opposed to diets. She was just bad at them. She remembers one of her college roommates—the most physically-strong player on the team, the teammate whose body was the most taut and muscular—decided one off-season to make her body more taut, more muscular. The roommate cut certain foods (read: pastas, sweets, anything deemed excess) from her diet for months, subsisted on grilled chicken and broccoli day in and day out. The woman remembers watching her roommate’s number on the weight room scale dip lower and lower during the weekly team weigh-ins. (She always tried to avert her eyes from the numbers. But she was curious.) The woman remembers her roommate’s elation at having dropped fifteen pounds in a couple of months. She remembers liking a photo on Instagram: her roommate’s visible abs, the bulge of flexed bicep. The roommate was still the strongest in the weight room after her cut, a clear favorite among the weight room coaches. 

The woman was jealous. Of her roommate’s body, of the praise. She wanted to be the strongest. She wanted to be the most athlete of athletes.  

The woman couldn’t stomach grilled chicken and broccoli. (She still can’t.) But she did eat a little less for a month or so. She tried eating what she thought was healthier. She tried choking down a salad once at McDonald’s and then shit her brains out from either food poisoning or a timely virus. Before seeing Frozen for the third time in theaters, the woman tried to save most of her calories for the day for a buttered popcorn. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t wait to eat. She hated the sensation of hunger. So she ate a handful of chocolate chips on the way out the door. She drove through McDonalds for a double cheeseburger and Diet Coke. She ate a small buttered popcorn and nursed her feeling of failure with the crooning of Elsa, queen of Arendelle. 

The woman wants to time travel now, sneak into the theater, and nestle in one of those old, floppy chairs beside her younger athlete self. 

Let’s go there now. Join the woman in daydream. 

 When she sits, the woman’s lower stomach bulges, a soft cushion. She strokes her neck out of habit, an unconscious smoothing of excess. She places her hand, too large for her athlete self’s favorite rings, on the armrest, and calculates her next move. Her instinct will tell her to lean into the ear of her younger self and whisper, Enjoy that popcorn while you can—your body looks so good—yes, shhh, it does, you look incredible—because you exercise three hours a day. The minute you’re done with volleyball and keep eating the way you do—your body will change. Heck, you’ll eat more one day. Anxious and lonely, you’ll down second breakfasts in grad school, or you’ll order too many after-work cookies from Panera. One day, you’ll be thirty pounds heavier, almost forty at one point, though I know you swear now that can never happen. The muscles you take for granted, the legs and arms that make you, “you?” Gone. Give it a few years, and you won’t be the “you” you know now ever again. So enjoy it.  

But she wants to fight instinct and speak to comfort both selves. She wants to say, Selves—and bodies, and lives, and everything—change. Your relationships with food and your body are just other relationships to be navigated. It’s a process. Everything will be ok. 

If she ever does time travel, the most likely scenario will be this: the woman will sneak into the theater. She’ll sit beside her athlete self, and reach a hand into the buttered popcorn, cup a portion in her palm. The pair of selves, unsure of what to say to each other, will focus their attention on the screen. During “Let it Go,” both selves will ache. Both selves will feel deeply seen in Elsa’s quest to rid herself of “that perfect girl.” In the decade-plus of space and time between the selves, this ache, this desire to “let it go,” will not have changed. 

*

The hummingbird, whether she knows it or not, is cared for. The woman cares for her very much. 

It’s a sweltering late summer, so the sugar water must be changed often to avoid alchemy into alcohol. The woman changes the nectar almost every day before she leaves for work, mixing four parts water to one part sugar in a souvenir cup the woman bought at a football game. She loves scooping the sugar with one of her measuring cups and dumping the easy weight of it into a clean bed of plastic. She loves the sound of water slowly trickling from the faucet, and how the sugar billows in a cloud of gray-grit before the swish of spoon. She always tastes after stirring, delighted to share a snack with the hummingbird. 

As she’s grown older, the woman tries to care for herself, too. She’s added a few vegetables and fruits to her diet because she figures it couldn’t hurt—carrots dipped in jalapeno hummus, fresh raspberries dusted in sugar, sweet onions browned in butter, soups full of butternut squash or mild peppers or specks of black beans, and sweet potatoes crisped in the air fryer. She’s also tried to simplify things so she’s not thinking about food so much. She eats the same thing for breakfast each morning and has for a few years—two Eggo waffles smeared with whipped butter, a coffee with creamer and two Splendas. She eats sandwiches for most lunches, and has designated nights for her favorite pizza or fast food. The routine has helped her thwart old impulses to use food as comfort. Of course, food is and can be a comfort. But the woman remembers those first years of grad school when she’d consume second breakfasts in the student union before her shift in the writing center. She remembers the lonely, unsure ache that came with those early mornings. Those meals were not comfortable. She knows now she imposed her imposter syndrome onto those breakfast sandwiches, turned her anxiety into something physical—and then devoured it. But in doing so, those feelings only grew. 

She goes on hour-long walks looking for birds. Her birding escapades become the most sacred time of day. In the early mornings, she bids farewell to the hummingbird for a while, though she really doesn’t—she knows how to spot hummers in the wild now, zipping between houses and trees like too-fast bumble bees. She straps a fanny pack to her waist and stuffs a small pair of binoculars inside. She ventures to walking paths lined with trees or medical buildings or soccer fields or to the edge of the lawn of her apartment complex where huge, beautiful oak trees grow. She walks slowly, without rush. She’s not trying to win anything. She peers through the binoculars and opens her birding app to listen and identify birdsong. This is so different from other activities in her post-athlete body. During tennis or jogs or stints of jump rope, the woman feels every bit of her body—the bounce of flesh and the sore flex of muscle or the way her shoulders stay tensed. But the woman forgets herself when she birds. She’s ungrounded, transported to the tips of trees or to the sky. When she birds, the woman is gloriously out-of-body. She becomes the flutter of leaves; the rustle of wings. 

*

Just before she migrates one thousand miles south to her wintering grounds, the hummingbird eats—and eats and eats and eats. She doubles her weight for her journey, bulks her body into something soft and round. The fat accumulated during her feeding frenzy is enough to carry her 600 miles without a pit stop. The hummer’s body is visibly changed. She almost looks like a Beanie Baby from the woman’s childhood—soft and squishable, a belly full of beads. Now, the hummingbird, sporting her migration body, perches for a spell in the rain as the woman watches. The hummingbird leaves tomorrow for Mexico. Water beads along her beak as she dips her head to drink. Satiated, plump, she shakes and fluffs her body plumper, catches raindrops between her feathers. The woman is in awe of the hummingbird. The woman wishes she could reach through the window and cup the bird in her hand. Feel the weight of her. She wishes she could know her own body’s changes in the way she understands the hummingbird’s. Migration. A change of season. A vessel for fuel to get her through the rest of her life. A body to carry her.