They lived in the new TeaHouse and came up for breakfast most mornings. I felt like the luckiest person. We are all trying to remember happy again after digesting sadness last year. I have been thinking of grief as a machine, an engine that chews its way through the dense material and manufactures something more refined. Maybe an alchemy or an assembly line, not sure.I read that every grief is the most important one.
As we are leaving, driving to the airport, Corina comes up and finds a large bird in the house. She has no idea how it got in but nabs it in a bedsheets and sets it free. That's one.
Then today Mike goes to get eggs, and comes across a mother hen and a clutch of chicks. She must have sat on the eggs in the weeds outside the chicken coop and yard. I wonder out loud if they will escape the hawks and coyotes. That's two.
I stop to tell Myngo, my neighbor about the chicks. He has been seeing so many bluebirds, the ground is a carpet of blue. Blue birds are signs of a healthy ecosystem, or so I've been told. That's three.
This morning, sitting in the house we hear the familiar and dread bird-slam against the window. There should be a word for bird hitting window despite a decal silhouette of a hawk. We go and look and it is a hawk, taking a few last breaths. On my table the book H is for Hawk sits unopened. What's going on, Corina wonders.
Before Hope left she found a tiny rabbit, carried it in her hands, though I am fearful of rabbit fever. It was the cutest of creatures, and after she put it back, the mother seemed to reclaim it. Who eats who? Texas is flooding, we are now in a bird wonderland, they are feasting now on the refilled feeder.
Creatures coming and going all around us. My daughter is flying back to my old home. The hawk to hers, the hen making herself at home. We are cleaning the house, grateful to have one. My friend's husband about to or already crossing over.
And of course, our spirit baby, Jade Bird. Her ashes buried here in the best garden on our land.
Succulents and petunias and morning glory. A hummingbird feeder still a-buzz. That's the place I go and feel most alive, into the sadness and the vitality.
That's invisible and indivisible. That's another One.
