The birds have hatched. I saw them during my morning elliptical routine in the music room.
At first, the nest that’s just outside the room’s window seemed both empty and rundown, like Ma hadn’t made the bed for a couple of days. I thought she was gone for good to find a more suitable birthing space.
From my vantage on the inside of the window, I couldn’t see much else. But then she flew into the nest with breakfast in her mouth and I saw them, those skinny and wrinkled little things, poking their heads up and reaching and stretching their mouths wider than you’d think is possible.
Ma did this several times – took off, left the little ones terribly alone, then came back with the goods, usually a worm. All just inches from my face.
I elipiticalled and listened to Handel’s water music and read a story about a driver who talked to his car for a long time on a long interstate drive to get away from it all – but, really, it was the birds that were the story.
Not just their birth, but their care. It’s not unlike what that oft-wild poet-king David wrote a few thousand years ago, that “You will be fed with the finest of wheat, and you will be satisfied with the sweetest of honey from the rock.”
Those words once grabbed me like very few others ever have. It was a promise, a clear one, given to me at a point in my life when I was rather needy (as if we’re ever not needy … no, we’re always all starving beggars in need of the same piece of bread. )
But then not long after that promise, that Divine Ma fed me just what I needed. My Bride, who is a sort of Ma Bird in her own way, can tell you more.
I should add that after she fed her kids, Ma, that is the Ma bird that was so close to me in the nest on the other side of the window, sat on those kids. To keep them safe. And warm. And from their worst enemies, I suppose, themselves.
Those helpless little newborns aren’t going anywhere. Not at the moment, anyway. And my own kids – who came into this world as a result of that promise of fine bread and sweet honey from some years ago – will be thrilled to see them.