“Oh Mommy!” the little girl in the floral dress cooed to her mother.
I felt the same.
That splash of vivid brightness on such a perfect creature takes your breath away!
The delicate Robin whose crimson colored breast chased ugliness from sight delighted little children on Starbucks patio.
Better still, her nest in a nearby tree stirs a keen anticipation for summer’s hatchling sounds of chirpy appetites and a renewal of hope for our futures, the little things and we ourselves.
I barely spy her nest, exquisitely fashioned, basket-like; roundish and stout. She flits charmingly now...and again keeping custodial observance of her eggs.
Such treasures! Two little reasons for tomorrow and tomorrow…
Her cheery warble is like a sip of golden tea on a perfect afternoon.
What is she telling our worried world? Whatever it might be is so alive with possibility and wonder from on high!
Perhaps she is announcing to one and all the names of her babies soon to arrive?
I'll work on that myself.
____
But then there is weather in Texas…
Angry winds prowled through the city.
Drunken brawlers huffing challenges haunted my ears--memories of convicts banging some unwitting kid senseless returned from an evil yesterday long ago.
Destroyers and predators and battalions seemed alive inside those winds, gusting by day and all night!
North of here a tornado smashed and battered all things indiscriminately.
By daybreak, what had been done filled the headlines with sadness and woe.
______
My morning ride along the streets to the patio at Starbucks was strewn with broken branches, confetti leaves, unlikely heaps of wild debris. It could have been a battlefield.
I parked and locked my bicycle as always and fetched my cup of hot brown stimulus.
I think to myself, “My heart will be cheered when Momma Robin brings her sunshine to chaos.”
Those high winds had tossed patio chairs and jumbled tables like a saloon brawl. One of the baristas was setting things right as I settled and opened my laptop.
That’s when I heard the barista--heard the catch in her voice. It was a wounded sound and not a word.
_____
I turned and caught sight of her just as she leaned down and shook her head sadly, slowly side to side.
“Ohhh. So sad. A nest!”
“What is it?” That unhappy music in her voice made me curious now.
“Little blue eggs.”
I jumped up and hurried over.
_____
The Robin’s eggs were unbelievably beautiful.
That is--until you realized they were destroyed.
The exquisite nest was completely intact but a tree branch had snapped and the poor creatures’ future was wrested into the maelstrom of oblivion.
The nest was empty.
One egg lay two feet away in grass. The other was on the other side, on concrete.
One was crushed flat. The other was the saddest sight of all.
An almost perfectly begun baby could be seen, pink with an ugly beauty only sudden death could fashion so brutally. Its little head was halfway out of the interior shell.
Was it ever conscious? What had it seen in that last awful glimpse of a world it would never know?
My thoughts were hurting me--I stopped and withdrew and a shudder came over me.
A stupid writer with a grisly imagination!
Just...Stop it!
______
The barista disappeared inside to get some sort of bag while I forced myself into the chair and deliberately turned my brain somewhere (anywhere) else!
That’s when I saw Edgar. (Edgar is a local Crow whose personality and antics I often write about. He is quite an irrepressible creature, a charlatan, a racketeer, and endlessly surprising.)
He was on the top of the green umbrella not five feet from the nest and the remains of a spoiled Robin family.
Did I somehow see compassion in those yellow and black eyes?
Could he feel what I was feeling?
Crows are wicked smart.
Their calculus is for us unknowable.
Was there any point at all to a Crow with emotions of sadness or regret or camaraderie?
Perhaps Crows were merely practical creatures unburdened by lament and grief.
I turned away as my cell phone rang and lost myself in the conversation for a minute or so.
The barista returned with a trash bag and small whisk broom. I finished my call and watched as she went about opening the ‘body bag’ and steadying herself for the task ahead.
“Oh my God!”
“What? What is it?”
“Over there!”
My eyes swept past the patio into the bushes. I knew the location all too well.
It is Edgar's hidey-hole.
There he stood, one foot on the crushed eggshell as he wrangled what was left of the baby Robin into his mouth.
He looked up at us quite indifferent to our horror as if to say,
“You expect me to waste perfectly good food?”
_____
I just don’t know.
I don't.
I really don't.