.JPG)
Living in a 150-year-old farmhouse is a costly joy. There's always something that needs fixed, dug up, cleaned, replaced, or ignored until I've got the time and emotional strength to deal with it. But unlike most new houses, an old house loves you back by bestowing strange and unexpected gifts. While checking for bats in the attic today, I came across something a lot more pleasant.
.JPG)
It'll be a three-story drop if these baby robins hatch and fall. But here on a high windowsill, at least they're safe from that nasty yellow cat--Grimalkin--who lives in the basement of my summer kitchen (top photo). It sure will be cool to watch from inside the attic window as the baby birds break out of their sky-blue eggs and grow. I hope they all three survive into adulthood, then take flight someday, and go off to build nests of their own.
.JPG)
Isn't that the risk? You can invest your time, and your energy, and your heart in a nestful of little blue promises, only to see the day when their possibility is wasted, when they drop from a high ledge like pebbles into a pond. Is loving worth the risk? Is it wise to place all our eggs in a single precarious basket? Or do the wise flee the possibility of loss and fly away to live for themselves? Most creatures invest their lives in the future and in other creatures--their offspring. All life is about hope, isn't it, Momma Robin? Birds and humans live for hope...no matter how small. Happily, a new steel roof seems to have solved the bat problems in the attic.
Alas, three weeks later, the nest is abandoned with one festering egg left behind. My kids and I saw two baby birds in it about ten days ago, far too small to fly. Now the nest itself bears all the signs of dereliction that are universal to abandoned structures---whether built by human hands or avian claws.
ReplyDelete