Tiffany Winn Rueckert grew up in the central valley of California but fell in love with an East Coaster. She taught sixth grade for five years in Utah after graduating from Brigham Young University. Tiffany now peddles petals from the local flower farm during season while raising and homeschooling three boys in the woods of Maryland.

A few months ago my husband, David, left for Singapore on a business trip and five minutes later a snow storm hit. Perfect. The impending chaos of a week of wrangling three young boys while knee deep in two feet of domestic mess inside – and two feet of Mid-Atlantic mess  outside – had me cowering.  Like magic, the boys were invited to a neighbor’s house to play for a few hours and I found myself alone in a quiet house. I thought it was the perfect time to clean and catch up on chores, maybe shovel the walk. The perfect time, that is, until I sat on the couch mesmerized by the falling snow. And then noticed the starving winter birds. And those bully starlings who had monopolized the neighbors’ birdhouses.  I could see the songbirds hopping around the periphery, trying their luck at nabbing up what spillage they could through the snow.  Aware of their plight, I filled a bowl full of seed outside my front window and came in and sat down.  I watched as the songbirds accepted my offering and came, their happy melodies inviting one after another after another until my front porch was filled with a feathery feast.

After a good twenty minutes guilt was setting in — I was wasting time. But the cardinals! I had noticed them in the brush but they hadn’t found the seed and were too shy to wander over. I dismissed the guilt and nagging and told myself I would sit right there, watch the snow fall, and wait for a cardinal to be brave enough to wander out of the brush. Birds in and out of the dish for well over an hour until finally–a cardinal. I dare say I was as pleased with this quiet accomplishment as I would have been with a cleaner house.

Who tells me I have to clean clean clean? Clean to feel productive? Or that my time has to be “productive” at all?  Or why isn’t bird watching productive?  Could it be that taking the time to carve out an aesthetic experience for myself was a constructive use of time?  I was calmer and  more relaxed. I was aware. It was a wonderful use of my quiet time and wouldn’t you know I still had time to shovel the walk?

Taking the time to connect to what was going on outside and to enjoy the beauty of a winter afternoon is nothing to feel guilty about. As much as our culture tries to teach us to produce, produce, be efficient and goal-oriented, I feel a constant struggle to remember – this is not a race. This is life! There is snow to be admired, there are birds to be watched, there is quiet to ponder.

The boys came in a bit later and stomped and scattered the wet storm all over my unclean house. I was grateful not to have to yell at them for ruining my work. Instead, I showed them the pictures of the cardinal, the video I caught of the gray squirrel that visited the seed, and showed them the hundreds of soft bird tracks all along the front window, where they then learned the stillest of still art of bird watching.

How very productive.