Day before yesterday, I was sitting outside looking at my poor, damaged garden, feeling somewhat depressed at all the havoc played by the golf ball to baseball size hail we got Sunday night. Had been putting up feeders since April, but no hummers to date, when up flew a gorgeous little female Ruby Throat. She looked at the feeder, but bypassed it for the remaining few blooms on the honeysuckle flava. Don't blame her, I had been lax about filling them with fresh nectar, having not seen any. I just thought it would be another year that I would not see any until late July or August.

I immediately went inside to make fresh sugar water, but waited until yesterday morning to clean and refill the feeders.

It wasn't long before she appeared and was happily sipping the fresh nectar! It lifted my spirits with renewed hope that everything was going to work out fine.

A bit later, one of my favorite hummingbird moths appeared to nectar on the banana in the suet feeder. A beautiful little Nessus sphinx. These are just a bit larger than the Snowberry Clearwings, reddish-brown in color, with two vivid yellow stripes around the lower abdomen. They always love the bananas as much as the butterflies.

So, two harbingers of hope appeared suddenly, without expectation, and now I can rest assured that all is right with the world, despite my garden, which will recover in due time.

Mother Nature can be cruel, but she can also be astute.

Susan