Her grandmother painted thousands of watercolors, curling surf from Pemaquid to Monhegan, sunsets so alive you could feel their warmth, almost sentient, crackling like a fire before your feet. More broadly, her grandmother painted life, and nothing more elegantly against any skyline – dusky, bright, or barren – than Maine’s own Great Blue Heron. 

Somehow, like the poet seeing something in what others count as small, her watercolors caught in the Great Blue Heron something often missed, the ability to pause, live unhurried, act with care and intention, lifting giant wings and flying in slow motion over wetlands and open ocean.

Her Blue Heron watercolors, as much as any subject she painted – Maine’s rocky coast, bobbing lobster boats, lighthouses on rough-cut spits of land, dories on moorings, or her inland scenes, Maine’s tumbling rivers, Mount Katahdin, paired doves or owls, a pheasant – were present.

When her grandmother died, fate and fortune being as they are, life never conforming to plan, she was headed for a foreign land. So foreign and so far away, that returning was not within reach, and so – by prayer – she put her love in words, recalling her grandmother’s favorite bird.

Her plane landed – in China, as it turned out – and within minutes, life being a get-along-move-along affair, she was soon in a taxi headed for her local destination. That is when it happened.

From nowhere—as herons are uncommon in China—suddenly appeared out her window, slate-grey, matching her car’s speed and height, the wings of a heron, right there, in graceful flight.

The bird stayed long enough to leave an impression, slow flap to slow flap, gently flying beside her, as if to say, worry not, I am here, and you are here, and this trip is a gift, this moment part of an unseen forever zone, and you, you … are not alone. Then … the big bird was gone.

Those facts still strolled my brain, not so long ago. They remind me of a poem by Robert Frost, another devotee of Maine, birds, and words. His poem is entitled “For Once, Then, Something.” It is not very long, nor much recalled these days, yet moving.

“Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing               

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me myself in the summer heaven godlike

Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

Once when trying with chin against a well-curb,

I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.”

For me, I think the morale is nothing more than this: Keep your eyes open for what others miss, the temperament and grace, peace and poise of a Great Blue Heron, what lies right there, beneath the surface, what the speed of life is so quick to hide, the possibility of eternity at our side.

For you see, so much of what seems far away is not so far, I think. Little hints tell us more than libraries full of ink. They tell us to pause, live unhurried, act with care and intention, hear great wings about us, see what my mother saw, and why my daughter was so filled with awe.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).