I jumped on WordPress this morning in a scurry to catch up with the A-Z Challenge and my reader was full of birds.  A robin from nature has no boss and many cardinals from avian101.  I wont post the pictures as they belong to these photographers, but checking out their post is worthwhile.  They inspired this – and possibly one other – post.  Thank you for your beautiful images!

Babu is our bird, our downstairs Bluebird as we call her.  Adam is writing a song.  It’s her feathery laugh.  It’s in her daintiness.  It’s in the way she built her nest for this last century, things just so, caring for those under her eaves.

Babu always asks if we can see the birds that nest above our windows.  Adam and I live above her on the second floor and if we look down, all we can see is the roll of vinyl installed however many years ago meant to unroll and shade the house, and roll back up to let light in.  Adam and I have never touched them.  Never shifted them.

Our laziness and lack of old fashioned values has created a haven for the sparrows.  From Babu’s chair at the kitchen table she can see birds fly up and disappear.  She sees the fluff and straw that tumbles down and dirties up her window.  But they are protected.  None of us can see their many homes.

They are welcome here.

Many mornings when Babu emerges from the bathroom and comes into the kitchen to don her apron and take her seat for breakfast, she looks to the window, to the sky, and asks, in Polish:

No sun today?

The early morning light can be lacking.  Sometimes I must tell her it’s a stormy day and she will not see the sunshine out of her window until, I hope for her, the next day.  She is 100 years old.  You think Mamma Nature could just give her some sunshine.

She has been insistent lately: “I wish someone would move that…” she struggles for the word bird feeder “…back to the right place.”

I tell her I will  get it, but haven’t in a while.  I wonder what our point was to set that feeder right outside the window, and then to hardly ever fill it.  I disappoint myself.  She is a hundred years old.  The least I could do is fill the bird feeder that sits right outside her window.

The birds eat it so fast!  Who ever came up with the idea that “eating like a bird” was to eat very little and to be clean about it?  I see what those birds do the moments that food stays out there.  They quarrel, it flies all over the place, they have bits and pieces stuck to their beaks, they dump it all over the ground, they eat so much!, and in way, so much like Babu.  There is no quarrel with her, but her appetite never faded and she spreads her conquered crumbs across her face, down to her red and white polka dotted apron with a proud rooster on the pocket, and scatters bits on the floor.

That is a perfect scenario in our ecosystem.  Stella is happy to be there to clean up after Babu!