When I feed the birds, I talk to set them at ease. I know they’re somewhere in the trees, though unseen, watching me walk to the shed, pull out the bag of black oil sunflower seeds, lug It to the mimosa tree with the multiple trunks and multiple feeders.
Helloo, birdies! I know you’re watching me. I’m filling up your pantries. Eat well and take care of your babies.
I wonder if they’ll ever be used to me. Waiting for dinner a little closer, giving me a wink, landing on my shoulder if I stand still enough. Or are they smarter than us? Do they innately know that predators often offer treats?
Helloo, birdies! Watch from wherever feels safe. I’ll still fill the pantries. Eat well, take care of babies, and listen to your instincts.
I’m never worried that the squirrels will eat my birdseed. Maybe it’s squirrel seed. Why would I use the gas and spend the money to haul home feed for one species while wishing to shoo away another?
I love nature, not just birds.
I’ve never worried that the ants will find the hummingbird cocktail. It’s sugar — what’s not to love? Why would I fill the glass bulb and screw on the base and hang it upside down for the bumblebirds and not let the workers have a donut?
I love life, not just the pretty kind.
I’ve never worried that other people will benefit from the rights I fight for. We’re all in this time together. Why would I carry a sign and march down the street chanting words of resistance and equality and not want every body to experience justice?
John William Hill, “The Dead Bluejay,” watercolor, 1865
I saw him on the bench as I pulled into the carport, a bluejay, on his back, pencil-lead feet curled around a ghost perch.
I took my dinner inside to eat before it got cold and to give the bluejay a chance to rouse if it was only a stunning.
It was not.
Satiated, I went to the shed, got the shovel, then thought twice, and got two shovels.
With one flat at the bluejay's edge, the other tipped him onto the metal -- I feel it was a him -- bluejays so often seem more they/them.
I suppose I could have thrown him in the woods. But I didn't. I took him to the spot where I dump yard trash -- not trash trash, yard trash -- sticks and weeds and the dried husks of hanging baskets I forgot to water.
I dug a grave, a shallow grave, no more than six inches. I was tired, and my full belly didn't care for so much activity. But, still, I dug a grave.
I put the body of the bluejay in the hole and stood for a moment. Should I say something? I didn't know what. I just looked at him, saw him, stayed with him in that moment.
It took just two heaping shovels of dirt to secure him in his final rest, and I thought, I wonder if he knows that every time I take yard trash to this spot, I will think of him. He will be remembered. HIs grave will be visited. He will be mourned.
I took my shovels back to the shed and only then did I think of my father, placed into a cremation oven before I could see his face one last time, buried in a jar that sits on my stepmother's mantel, I suppose, or was he scattered in the mountains? No one ever told me.
I have no grave to visit, no headstone to decorate, no symbolic point where his memory lives on demand.
His voice fades a little every day. His smell, I can almost . . . not quite. His laugh, the music of his laugh, dying away. And I don't know where to go to bring any of it back even for a moment.
Deb Moore 