A Bird In The Hand June 12, 2008
Posted by millyonair in Life, Things Environmental.Tags: Birds, Life, Nature, Saving the World, Thoughts
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I want to save the world. I can’t help it. When I was a kid, I made little crutches out of twigs to prop up the wilting plants in my mother’s flower garden. I’ve rescued a fence lizard from a pan of motor oil, performing an Exxon-Valdez style recovery over my kitchen sink with Dawn soap. I am also one of those people that will use a drinking glass and a piece of junk mail to carry a bug outdoors. My father and I have good-natured arguments about this kind of thing; he reminds me that insects outnumber humans by 200 million to one, and that the loss of a single spider or beetle is no great tragedy. Perhaps he’s right. But sometimes I wonder if the Universe is not one place, but many. The universe where I live feels these losses, mourns them.
On Tuesday, I found the latest of three birds to trap themselves inside my screened-in patio. This time, it was a wren. I think it was one of the recent fledglings that were nurtured in a light fixture on the carport. Its feathers were the new-looking kind, like little tassels of an underwater plant, the fibers not yet knit together. Of course it was terrified. It fluttered around the patio, careening into the screens and our home’s exterior walls. The only direction it wouldn’t fly is the way it came in. After about three minutes of frantic flapping, it hit the glass with a thud and landed on the concrete, stunned. This happens every time a bird gets in. (more…)
A Gift of Paradox June 9, 2008
Posted by millyonair in Life.Tags: Add new tag, Gift, Gyspy, Life, Love, Marriage, Relationships, Running Away
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On Friday evening, I ran away from home. I didn’t intend to stay gone; I planned to come home after dark, after the stars had been pulled up over the day, after it had melted irretrievably into a shallow pocket in the horizon. I ran away to the top of a hill to watch the sunset, to watch the night rise. To scrutinize the sky for the first star so I could harvest a wish from it. I remembered coming to this hill when I was a child with my mother and my brother, always in the brightest part of the day. We would climb the stone steps, and survey our town, panting into the blue-yellow-greenness; an accomplishment. As a teenager I climbed this hill at night with my friends when one of us was sad about a breakup or a divorce, as though we could climb up out of the sadness, like the sadness was a choking fog that had pooled in the valley below. Or sometimes we weren’t sad at all. Sometimes we just wanted to feel the wildness of the night air on our young skins, appreciating the novelty of being out-of-doors after dark.
Maybe all of those things drove me to the hill on Friday night, memories of an old comfort, although I didn’t remember them until I was there. I think this is something that all women want to do sometimes: To run away for a little while, to reclaim something for themselves. To do something without asking first. (more…)
