Saving the birds

Winter is no time to be housebound.  Recently, I went to Kentucky to visit and offer some help to my mother, who was home recuperating from knee replacement surgery.  Since our phone topics were narrowing to increasingly mundane obsessions, it occurred to me that maybe I wanted to get home for a few days, to assess her well being, and to see whether she was yet channeling her inner Jack Torrance.  Shortly after I landed, mother nature, like Jackson Pollock, scattered ice across the state, bringing bluegrass life to a screeching halt.  And oh, mother nature, how she laughed her deep, sinister laugh, as my own mother invented tasks that had barely waited for my arrival, such as the much needed written inventory of years old food in the basement freezer.  As I scraped my fingernails down the inside of the living room window panes, I noticed that things outside weren't as still and quiet as I had thought them to be.  Everywhere, there were birds.  Robins and sparrows and the occasional cardinal covered the trees and blanketed the frozen lawn.  They flew in what might be described as frantic patterns, back and forth across my line of vision, swirling and diving and climbiing, in relentless repetition.  It was enough of a spectacle to make me forget the cross I thought I bore.  How, I wondered, do birds find food in this weather?  Where do they sleep?  What shelters them from so much falling sleet and ice?  As I stood and gazed, and pondered the challenge of survival for these fragile creatures, feeling my own relative burdens lighten, my mother quietly joined me at the window.  As though echoing my thoughts, she murmered, "I hope they make it."  In that moment, I knew that the next few days would be fine.  I would help in whatever way she needed.  There was no call for using her to-do list as a measure of her sanity.  I would return north, knowing that the little acts, whatever they were, would warm her winter, even if just a bit.  After a  pause, she added, "because I really don't want to be picking up dead robins tomorrow."