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It was December, 1925, and a blizzard raged outside Ada Clapham Govan’s Lexington, Massachusetts, window. Somehow, despite the wind, a faint
chickadee-dee-dee reached her ears. The bird’s jaunty call broke through Govan’s despair, and she managed to scatter some breadcrumbs for the storm-tossed visitor clinging to her icy porch rail. It snatched up a few morsels, disappeared briefly, then returned “with every relative and friend” to devour more handfuls of her offerings. “The elation, the spiritual uplift I sensed in that moment,” she later wrote, “marked the re-birth of hope.”