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\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n An Excerpt from Hummingbird Man by Kinky Friedman<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cChildhood at best,\u201d my father said, \u201cis a fleeting golden moment in the race of time.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My mother and father, or Aunt Min and Uncle Tom as the children often called them,\u00a0spent sixty years helping to create those moments at Echo Hill Ranch. <\/p>\n The juniper tree blew down in a storm two years ago,\u00a0but the hummers have found other places to nest. One of them is in my heart.\u00a0And I still see my dad sitting under the juniper tree, only the tree doesn\u2019t seem dead\u00a0and neither does he.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It takes a big man to sit there with a little hummingbird book, <\/p>\n Thus it was that my sister Marcie and I decided to bring the old camp back and introduce\u00a0boys and girls from Gold Star families to the magic of Echo Hill.<\/span><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_fullwidth_header][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 An Excerpt from Hummingbird Man by Kinky Friedman \u00a0 \u201cChildhood at best,\u201d my father said, \u201cis a fleeting golden moment in the race of time.\u201d My mother and father, or Aunt Min and Uncle Tom as the children often called them,\u00a0spent sixty years helping to create those moments at Echo Hill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-227","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/227\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/echohill.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Now on cold, bright mornings, I stand in front of the old lodge, squinting into the brittle\u00a0Hill Country sunlight, hoping I suppose, for an impossible glimpse of a hummingbird\u00a0or of my mother and father. They\u2019ve all migrated far away, and the conventional\u00a0wisdom is that only the hummingbirds are ever coming back. Yet I still see my mother\u00a0hanging up that first feeder.<\/p>\n
taking the time to talk to a group of small boys. He is telling them there are more\u00a0than three hundred species of hummingbirds. They are the smallest of the birds and\u00a0also the fastest. They\u2019re also, he tells them, the only birds that can fly backward.\u00a0The little boys seem very excited about the notion of flying backward. They\u2019d like to\u00a0try that themselves they say. So would I.<\/p>\n