unbind him, and let him go

april finally got here. though on sunday, march seemed to tug hard at winter, come monday the sun came out and by tuesday, there was no foolin', none at all, because the birds woke up with cackling spirits, singing so loud about this new warmth that on our morning walk, we almost asked them to tone it down. 

but we didn't. 

everyone around me —neighbors, family, co-workers, birds, dogs, even strangers on the street looked up at the blue sky and said, well, thank heaven it's april. finally. 

now we take our meals outside and drive home with the windows down, drinking in the warm air deep and quick because soon the pollen will kick in and we'll have to shut the windows again.

april. a good month for me historically. the month of birthdays: my mother's— a birthday shared by a dear, lifelong friend and a godchild — a day that always meant Mama'd get a new azalea for the yard from her children and a bouquet of yellow roses from my father. april meant meeting Lydia on the back road to ride our bikes to school in the bright morning. it meant spring cleaning, when i'd come home from school to find my hair brush and comb soaking in ammonia in the bathroom sink and all my winter clothes put away, my spring dresses hanging crisp and pressed in my closet.

April in college: i was tapped on my mother's birthday to edit the school literary magazine. (it was the best birthday present i gave her, ever.) my first child began life one april day. it's the month of my grandfather's birthday.

last year April took on a different meaning for me. a sadness that it's taken me just about a year to shake. but i can feel myself unbinding, if only a little bit.

my siblings and i have traded emails today. routine things when you're dealing with estates and mothers and whatnot. when i looked at the calendar, i could not help thinking of this same day last year, when our lives took a tumble (my mother a literal one, breaking her femur in Daddy's hospital room.) i wrote about it

here and here.

i'm blessed to have the mother i do. in this year we have all marveled, because she is all about April. Just watching her deal — with my father's illness and death, her broken leg and weeks in a wheel chair. in the weeks after Daddy died, when i visited her, each day brought progress. she got up out of the wheelchair. walked with a walker, then a cane. caring for herself. climbing stairs. set up a new home, drove herself, engaged life again. 

so we are celebrating with a party, not a birthday party (though it will be on her birthday), but a spring celebration. we've invited her friends from home to visit, to share a little lunch and see her new house. now when we talk on the phone, planning, her voice is bright, expectant, unbound.

i started a new Bible study this week. I am not one for sitting down quietly and talking out loud about God, but there you have it. there is a long-standing joke that Episcopalians don't actually read the Bible. but i have found when two or there of us gather we actually do know the Bible pretty well. our

Book of Common Prayer

is filled with it, as is our Hymnal. 

my friends and i met in the early morning before work and spent a few minutes with Lazarus, which is the gospel for Sunday, and well, we found that apparently, there is a lot in our lives to resurrect. 

by the end of the hour, we were all weepy — just like Jesus in the story — considering the hope offered in this ancient tale. we each had different reactions to it, but the Lazarus story reminded me of that holy day last April when we gathered around my father to say goodbye. only i don't think i did, fully. but it's time. 

yes, april finally got here, and it seems to me now, the whole month is all about unbinding —  everything from peonies to people, opening up, letting the light in after a winter that seemed to offer little. 

in the past few days i have been thinking of little except my father. the tone of his voice, his grin, all the times i have wanted to call him up and ask him something medical. my family will gather on Easter Day to remember him on the anniversary of his death. we'll picnic at a place he loved to visit and maybe even have a few candied orange slices for dessert. it will be a good day, a bright day, and what better day than Easter, to end our year of grieving, to unbind him — and ourselves — and finally let him go?

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

take me home, country road

i set out at dawn, driving down the country road away from the home i have known for  50 years.

the fog lay low against the cotton fields, stretched out like a soft blanket over a child almost ready to wake up. 

that's what i wish it was, that fog, my own baby blanket draping right around me, whispering to me that it's not really wakeup time yet, that what i know to be true is not. 

what beauty. the vast fields of cotton and soybeans —  even tobacco — shrouded in a white pall that bore no sense of foreboding. just dawn about to happen. hope. 

a mile on, and the sun spilled over the fields onto the side of a barn. 

how must it feel, to stand at the edge of a field and watch the whole world that belonged to you wake up, the sun's first color shining red on your barn, knowing that your work ahead in that day mattered, was about more than what you had already put on that acre?

you know those moments, don't you, when you sense that your world will never pass quite this same way again? 

this morning a few weeks ago was that. it felt like i was taking in everything. every. thing. the boy waiting by the side of the road for his school bus, checking his iPhone. the hawk perched on the wire looking down on the peanut field, right where i have seen him almost every time i have come this way in the last year or so. the fog. the flat fields sliding past by me one by one — soybeans, peanuts, tobacco, cotton, right ready to be picked. 

i have been trying to write it all down for a month, each day sitting down in front of the blank page thinking: i must do this now. and then i don't. maybe i've been thinking that if i don't put it down it just wont happen. 

and yet, come monday, we will be well into

 what has until six months ago seemed an impossible thing. 

we are leaving my childhood home. 

moving its contents part and parcel to a new house that has been finely painted and polished, one that will take my mother closer to where she needs to be. one that my father never knew about. had never seen. in these few weeks we have gathered to pack and to ponder. 

what looms, seems soon to me — not yet six months since Daddy died — is necessary. just because i am not yet ready to let loose of the walls that raised me up doesn't mean it's not the right thing. what matters is that Mama will be close to family, safe, where she can savor all the years that have rolled out before her like the fog over the fields did for me on that day a month ago now. yes. safe. but sad.

i remember when i first went to college, i was so bent on being away and not looking back on the road that had brought me to the city. but come fall break, i caught a ride with a friend and when we turned at the crossroad toward home, the twilight set in, and i rolled down the window, sticking my face into the country smells, all the peanut hay and the scent of newly-picked tobacco, the cotton bolls ripening and well, i couldn't wait to get there. home. 

for years after i was married and living far away, whenever my husband and i drove out the driveway, i waved to my parents on their back porch perch and cried for 30 miles down the road. (and now, every single time i leave, just thinking about that memory.) 

every single time i walk in the back door, i see the soft lights of the kitchen, and i feel myself settling in. home. 

i can not imagine not knowing that anymore.

it was not supposed to be this way. my parents were going to live out their lives in this house, in this place — Daddy fairly well did — but things we had counted on just didn't come to be. 

the night before i drove away from home a month ago, i slept in my old room, tossing, waking often, trying to remember the hundreds of childhood nights and days i spent there, becoming me. our winter-weighted coverlets came from Sears, and we loved them. in summer, Mama would rearrange the furniture and drape our beds with paper-thin covers — white, with blue ruffles and tiny blue flowers all over — and we would sleep with our heads at the foot of the bed just to put a new slant on things. 

we found our baby clothes in an old attic trunk and dressed our dolls in them. i played 'school' behind the closed doors, with the chalkboard on the wall. barbies. spend-the-nights. tears. (a lot of those, my siblings would say.) winter nights after lights out, listening to cousin brucie on the transistor, memorizing the words to songs that would define my adolescence — jim croce. james taylor. gladys knight and her pips. the beatles.

Memories that come at night

Take me to another time

Back to a happier day....

i remember the day we moved in. i was 5, and i went home from kindergarten with ralph, our next-door-neighbor in our old house. we had hot dogs for lunch, the ones that swelled when you boiled them, not the red kind my mother cooked, and i couldn't eat them. later, my mother showed me my new room, one i would share with my sister til she was a teenager, with our matching closets and desks that Daddy built that looked like ladders on the sides. somewhere i have pictures. 

ours is a story house, full of sounds and smells. the saturday nights when we'd sit at the foot of my mother's bed and watch her smooth her nylons over her legs, attach her pearl earrings to her ears for an evening out with Daddy. the phone ringing at all hours. days when we would climb the ladder to the attic, playing on rainy days when we couldn't go outside. sitting at the kitchen table as teenagers sharing a dinner of steak fondue. or in the living room, on the sofa with Daddy and his banjo, wanting bill bailey, whoever he was, to please come home. listening to my sister play Climb Every Mountain when she had hit a sour note on some other song. the time Daddy gave me honey and whiskey to cure my cough. or the day i was making potato stamps and sliced the tip of my finger nearly off. (you can still see the scar.) the soft click of the pulls on my parent's dresser drawer when we looked inside to marvel at our mother's jewelry. the crinkle of the newspaper as Daddy shined his shoes. it is both present and past tense, will always be that in memory.

the living room chimney Santa came down that never once held a fire. the family room window the tree fell through when the first tornado hit. (there were two, years apart) the dining room window where just last year the squirrel hid in the drapes after chewing out the mullions. the sand pile where the dogs are buried. the front porch where we take our family pictures. the incinerator, where we burned our Christmas wrapping paper and set the yard on fire. 

opening the front door for my sister's first date with the man who would become my brother-in-law. closing it on the boy i would not marry. 

these are just my stories. my brother and sister have their own. my mother has hers, too. some we have shared, some are private, some only the house holds close.

stories: the bricks and mortar of any family's life, much more, i hope we learn, than the underpinnings of the building we have called home for 50 years. 

in an hour or so, my sister and i will set out down the road again toward home. we have business to discuss, lists to make to help this move be as easy on our mother as it can. but in the silence between our chatter lay all those stories, wrapping us up like a soft blanket in the early morning, warming us as we wait to breathe this new day in.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

i will always love my mama, she's my favorite girl

my mother sits in a wheelchair beside my father, her gloved hands holding his. she wears a brilliant blue dress just the color of her eyes, though it's obscured by the yellow gown we all have to wear now when we visit daddy. i watch the two of them, their eyes meeting as they nod to each other and speak a silent language only those who have been married for almost 61 years can understand.

she has been here at his side, most every day since that first day — february 6th. before the day that changed so much, i'd see her walking down the hall in her crisp denim pants and neatly pressed blouse or tailored jacket and i'd think: wow, i wish i could be that beautiful. in these weeks since daddy has been in the hospital, mama has seemed to grow more beautiful. she waves at the nurses in the hallway, the members of the lift team, the care partners —  by now she practically knows all their names and they know her, a quiet but kind woman whose beauty they see, like i do, in how she cares for my dad. 

now though, she can't get herself here, has to depend on others and on someone else's schedule to see the man she has been married to since she was 24. 

it seems impossible to think that they are now both on such difficult but parallel paths. daddy works each day to regain the strength he had when he walked into the hospital so many weeks ago. mama works to walk again, too, but for entirely different reasons.

in the middle of our day-to-day journey, there is something to celebrate. mama turned 85 years old today, and we had a party, just like we might any other birthday, with a picnic lunch in a side room and with yellow roses requested specially by my daddy, with cards. but we also celebrated by watching her learn to wheel herself down the hallway toward my father, so together we could cheer him on to lift his arms, shrug his shoulders, breathe on his own.

this might be a new challenge for mama, but it is not the first. 

betty jean mccormick byrum was born on april 12, 1928 and raised to be strong. to stand up for herself when need be, to fight back, even when she didn't feel like it. she has shown this to me over and over as i have grown up. when my father was sick and dying at 39 — and yet he didn't — when her family presented her with challenges — and especially right now. 

she. carried. on.

i wish i had gotten that from her. the pick everything up and steady the load and keep on walking kind of thing. she did a lot of that, the mother of three and wife of a doctor who was often with other people's families. she picked it— us — up, and gave us a pretty wonderful life.

i tend to leave life all on the floor — as evidenced by my bedroom closet and my home for the past few months — hoping someone else will come behind me and make everything all straight. usually mama. when i was a child, she usually did.

there have been moments in my life though, when i called on my 'mama' instincts and took care of the impossible. all by myself. picked myself up and moved through what i didn't want to, because i come from her stock.

now it is my turn again.

you know i am a storyteller. this comes sometimes much to my parents' chagrin. might i tell too much? in their eyes probably... i hope only to tell the important.

mama is not one to share many stories about her childhood. i can remember, though,  times when she shared a bit. how roosevelt died on her birthday. how she met my father at a medical school dance. (and my, was she beautiful.) how they lived their first married year with a

murphy bed

.

my favorite betty jean childhood story is the one when my grandmother sent her to the store to buy a loaf of bread, but wouldn't you know it? a new movie — "the wizard of oz" — was showing at the local theater. the 11-year-old betty jean rode her bike to the store, got the bread, and several hours later  — maybe she sat through two showings — she emerged from the dark theater, too late for my grandmother's sandwiches, but she was a changed little girl.

weren't we all changed by that movie? our grayscale worlds turned suddenly into color by the wind?

in these past weeks, it feels like the wind has taken our colorful world and upended it, picked up our settled family home with it and crashed it down so rakishly that we don't know which end is up. and the whole world has turned to grayscale again.

we are not alone. a church friend one day this week said her 97-year-old father had the same injury as my mom, her own mother already in 24-hr care. she wept, telling me her story, and all i could do was hug her. i understand. add her to my now pages-long prayer list for families like my own.

my siblings and i have often joked that our family is just so beige. to the outside world i am sure that's how it seems. we tend to cling close, though i am the one who puts the story out there. neither of my parents have been comfortable with my writing about them from time to time, but i hope one day they will understand why.

today is my mother's birthday. all the grandchildren called her, and one even came to visit. she sat next to the love her life and held his hand. and he told her he loved her, one more time. 

it was an honor to be with them as they shared their own private celebration.

today we celebrated my mother and my father. brave souls, both.

ps: a favorite college song was 'i'll always love my mama' by the intruders:

watch the video here  and dance!

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

and while you're at it, give her a bath

From In Mother Words, by Susan Byrum Rountree, 

Copyright 2003 (revised May 2011)

When I gave birth to my daughter on a frigid morning in December almost 28 years ago, I thought that meant I had become a mother. A baby to rock and coo to, that’s what I’d wanted for so long. But it wasn’t until a few days later that my transformation occurred. It happened when my own mother, who’d come to take care of us for awhile, walked out my front door with my husband and said: “Give her a bath while I’m gone.”

Now you have to know my mother to understand the power of these words. Take a bath, she was always telling me while growing up, and make it scalding. It’ll serve to scrub away whatever ails you, be it headache, splinter or broken heart.

She’d been right, of course. I’d even followed her advice not four days before. Tired of being swollen and perpetually in wait, I lowered my nine-months’ pregnant body into a scalding tub and sat, knowing this was exactly what my mother would advise me to do. And believe me, it soon cured what ailed me and my baby. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the baby who would be named Meredith told me it was time to come into the world.

A week later, when Mama handed my daughter over to me before heading out the door, she knew full well that “Give her a bath” was code for me — her own baby girl — to take my place among the mothers of my family. It was time, not to take the bath, but give it.

Of course I resisted. I’d watched her give Meredith a bath on the giant sponge on my tiny bathroom counter, but aside from wringing a dripping washcloth over her squirming body, I’d never been in charge. I had no idea how much baby bath to use or if I should wash her hair. Where would I put her while the water was heating up? What if it got too hot? How would I, with only two hands between me, find all the soiled places between her folds, hold her slick form without dropping her on the floor?

I heard the door slam behind me and pondered all these things in my heart. Then I stared at the pink form in my arms, realizing for the very first time that my mother would be going home soon, and this baby was mine to keep.

As I remember this, I think about the time we’d been studying the Chinese culture in 6^th grade, and I asked my mother if I could take one of her china bowls for show and tell.

“Only if you don’t break it,” she said to me. So I wrapped it carefully in newspaper, put it in a paper grocery bag and set out. That afternoon I triumphantly walked the mile home, juggling my mother’s bowl and an armful of books. I made it all the way to the back door, then paused, the books and the bowl in one arm, trying to open the door handle. Need I say more?  If I couldn’t be trusted with a china bowl, how on earth could I be trusted with a baby?

I thought about not giving my baby a bath at all and just saying I did. I mean, she looked clean enough to me. But after 20 years of living under the roof of the master of bath giving, I knew full well she’d find me out.

Poor Meredith. I tried to be gentle. Her wide eyes watched as I tested the water and soaped the soft cloth. She was tiny, slippery, not six pounds, but to me she weighed 16. I was as careful as I knew to be, and after a minute or two, my heart slowed a little, and I began singing to her, marveling at the very idea that this tiny form was so much a part of me.

When my mother came home that afternoon, Meredith was not only clean, but fed, burped and sleeping. I had finally begun my journey as her mother.

Soon enough, though, you learn that when you are out in the world with your new baby, everyone becomes your mother. They are well-meaning when they tell you you’re holding her the wrong way, offer advice on how to properly burp her or what to do if she won’t stop crying. Sometimes their advice is worth keeping.

I learned this lesson on my first trip out of the house with Meredith when we paid our first visit to the pediatrician’s office, that command post for mothers who claim to know more about how to raise a baby than other mothers in the room.

 This was January, middle Georgia, and though that part of the South is known more for its gentle winters, 1984 began as the year before it had ended, biting cold and blustery.

I had dressed Meredith for her outing, first in t-shirt and diapers, then in tiny white tights and pink sailor dress. Next came a hooded sweater and socks. After that, a quilted snowsuit that was so big her feet didn’t reach the toes. Then came a blue toboggan, bought when we thought sure she’d be a boy. The final layer was made up of two, mind you, two soft blankets.

 So tightly bound was she that you could barely see her tiny face. Her body wouldn’t bend in the car seat, not doubt, since she’d doubled her weight in the 10 minutes it took me to dress her. Never mind. My baby would not be catching cold in this weather.

When I reached the doctor’s office, the nurses gathered around to see her. I beamed, at this most perfect creature I’d created, almost by myself.

“Take some of these covers off this baby,” said one of them, surely a mother of 10. Could she tell that I’d been at it less than two weeks?

 I stood back, mortified, as she began to peel the layers away from my newborn, revealing the face of a child who has loved hot weather ever since.

 “Always be sure that you give her space to breathe, ” the nurse told me.

(If I’d tried to take Meredith out of the house when my mother was still visiting, not doubt she would have been the one to give me this advice. I related this story to my sister, and she admitted that though her daughter was born in the middle of August, the first time she took her outside, she wrapped her accordingly. My mother, who was a witness to this folly, was quick to remove the layers from my niece, lest she have a heat stroke. )

Give her a bath, give her room to breathe. I think of my own mother, and how many times she bathed me, not only in scalding water to scrub my ills away, but in the love she gave while I was growing up. I had no other model and surely I didn’t need one. She gave me room to breathe, too, to learn the ropes without her looking over my shoulder every minute.

We all need the bath to still us, and the breathing room to keep our lives moving forward on our own power.

Bathe the baby. Then give her room to breathe.

When I look back on these almost 28 years of being a mother, I know I’ve tried to follow these two rules. Both my children, now grown, know all about the power of the hot bath, and though they may think I’ve suffocated them with my questions about their lives, I hope they can appreciate those times when I’ve given them some needed air, allowing them to shape their own futures the way they see fit.

One day it will be my turn from my children to mother me. I hope they’ll remember that I’ll need to be bathed, not only with water, but in love and understanding. And I can tell you for sure, I will never outgrown my own need for room to breathe.

you are what you leave us to read about you

my dear friend says that when she dies, she wants the following in her obit: her name (not her age), her funeral arrangements and her survivors. period. no mention of the fact that she knows how to castrate a bull — wearing her evening clothes under her coveralls if she has to — play a concerto and the showstopper from Mame with the same fervor, or though she dislikes most sports except fox hunting, she has been my cheerleader since the 8th grade.

i am a student of the obit. ever since i can remember — even before i became a journalist — i would scan the obits looking for interesting people. because in the paper, that's where they all are. not on the front page, not in the crime stories (however interesting those are) or on ET or any of those celebrity shows, but there, in the back of the B section, inked in black on gray paper that crinkles when you lean on it.

some days the obits make me chuckle. like one of my very favorite obits, which included the line: and she died with her favorite child at her side. Other parts of that now infamous obit include a father who was so distraught an invention of his had been stolen that he put his head in the oven on thanksgiving, ending his life. but the family ate the bird anyway. What. They were hungry. and this was not his obit, but his daughter's.

i remember being in the shower when my husband came upstairs and said: you have to hear this. (we are both obitophiles), and when I called AB to share it with her, she thought I had written it. (high praise indeed.) that one garnered what felt like dozens of letters to the editor, outrage at the newspaper for printing such a thing, (because the obit not so subtly implied that the unfavorite daughter was gallivanting around the globe while her mother took her last breath (really). other letters came from neighbors of the deceased, who knew her to be just the kind of woman who would poke fun at her own death, with the blessing of her children — favored or otherwise.

Sometimes the social announcements provide fuel for a chuckle, too. Like the couple who after 50 years of marriage, decided to renew their vowels. I saved that one because it spoke to me somehow. All those old vowels have gotten a pretty good workout over the centuries. It's about time somebody renewed them.

but in the obits, i have met some remarkable people. i wish i could tell you about them all. like the man who felt his lasting impression should be the fact that as a boy he got to view the car where bonnie & clyde were shot to death. or the seamstress who had made wedding gowns, setting every single seed pearl by hand.

just today, a woman named pearl was known for sending beautiful pressed flower cards to her friends. and barbara, bless her heart, made memorable icicle pickles. shades of aunt bea, (sort of)

last week, though, an obit touched me like no other i can remember. first of all, it was for a couple.

clem and mary crossland. self-described country mice, dr. crossland and his wife raised five children, among them the physician who would care for them in their end days. they died four days apart, dr. c, quite clearly, of a broken heart. the first line that struck me was this:

"they left as they lived — together, with the lady first."

well, that had me weeping.

and this: "they raised five healthy children whom they lived to see become educated and contributing adults, something that is denied to so many mothers and fathers."

about their mother: "throughout her life, our mother reminded us daily of the admonition from St. Luke: 'For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.'"

my mother never said these things directly to us, but she has lived it.

and then: about the good doctor:"he was an intellectually brilliant and personally humble man who was a superb diagnostician of conditions of both the body and soul."

well. but that is my father. plain and simple. beautifully said.

the obit ended with this:

"there are some debts that are so enormous that they can never be repaid in full, even in a small measure – and the devotion of one's family is one of those. In honor of our parents, we ask that each of you pay it forward by treating your own loved ones with dignity, kindness and compassionate care for as long as you have the strength and resources, for you will not regret a day that you do so."*

of course i was sobbing by then, handing the paper to my husband, who sat across the breakfast table from me, his eyes blinking. 

i found myself thinking all day, and the much of the next: what would my children have to say about me? 

dr and mrs crossland have not left me, not yet. i didn't know them, but i thank their children for giving me a chance to try.

read the full obit here 

this one's for the birds

Ordinary joy. Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

Every morning as I make my coffee I look out at the birds. My mother taught me years ago how to know a common house wren from one called Carolina, a thrush from robin, catbird from mockingbird, junco from chickadee. I watch the towhee scratch for food on the ground, the nuthatch descending the tree head-down, and I thank my mother for one of the many simple joys of daily life she shares with me.

Bigdaddy & great-grandson, John, ca:1988

For bluebirds, I thank my grandfather. He used to raise them, if you can do such a thing, fashioning nesting boxes out of old pine, hanging them on the north side of the house, one in the small pine grove he planted when I was a child, just steps away from his front porch. On summer afternoons as we sat on the porch, splashes of blue flittered around the yard, father birds in and out of the boxes, feeding nesting mothers and later, growing broods.

When my husband and I bought a house in Atlanta, Bigdaddy brought me a handmade box, and we hung it on a tree in the back yard and waited. No bluebirds. We moved, taking the box along with us, rehung it, but nary a bluebird did we see. In 1989 we moved again, and once again I hung the box. No bird darkened the door for a year. One day before we had lived in the house for a year, Bigdaddy died. And on that morning as I was looking out my kitchen window, a flash of brilliant blue flittered through the yard. And landed on the door to the house. (I am NOT lying here.)

Sadly, he didn't stay, but I was hopeful. When the homemade box — not one of the fancy new ones — rotted, I reluctantly replaced it with a new one, moved the box a little more to the north side of our yard. Birds flittered through but never stayed. I put out meal worms, just like Bigdaddy did, and when a clutch took up in the plastic decorative box in my neighbor's back yard, they came to my house to feed. To bathe in the birdbath. Sort of like college students... it would be only a matter of time before they came home to stay. At least I hoped.

Eastern Bluebird, female —rountreemediaphotography

One morning earlier this year I scuffed into the kitchen, filled the coffee pot and looked outside. Blue, dancing through the yard caught my eye. A daddy bluebird was on the box. I watched, as he stood first at the door, then hopped in, his beak peeking out, then quickly, flew to stand on the box's top. I grabbed my binoculars, searched a nearby tree for Mama Blue, whom I knew was close at hand. And there she was, first on the top, then slipping so quickly inside I almost missed her. Back on the top, and the two danced a little jig, then flew away. Every morning after I kept watch, hating to leave for work for fear I would miss them if they returned. And then one day, in a flurry of wings and straw, they built a nest.

Years ago I bought a book on bluebirds, since my grandfather could no longer tell me how to raise them up. I knew now to knock before I opened the front door, but that it was ok to visit, to count. Each day I knocked, and each day I opened the door, first to find it empty. And then, joy! Two sky blue eggs. Then three. Then four. But Mama won't nowhere to be found.

Joy came again when I saw her on the top of the box. She flew inside. And stayed. Daddy flew in and out, keeping her sated. I brought more worms, and in the mornings, I knocked first, then sprinkled them on the top. Mama usually flew in from high up in the trees, out for her morning swirl, and watched. And before I was even steps away, she and Daddy stood there on the top, feeding.

Joy, again, when one day as I approached the box with my worms, I heard the tiniest chirps. Babies! I counted the days on my calendar, estimating when they might fledge, (16-21 days) worried I would miss it while I was at work.

But Mama bluebird was good to me. She waited to push those babies out of the nest on a day I was home and could watch. She sat in the dogwood, coaxing in a gentle voice, until one by one, they each took that first baby flight toward her, their soft freckled down fluttering. It seemed to take hours. And then suddenly, they were gone.

I kept feeding the worms. And my bluebird parents came back each morning for the feast.  At least for awhile. By midsummer, there was no sign of them, until one day, my father was visiting, and we noticed twigs coming out of the sides of the box. We opened the box to find not pine needles and straw but the makings of a nuthatch nest, which he advised me to remove, as there were no eggs inside. Within the week, my bluebird couple was back, and four more eggs took up residence. And I bought more worms.

This time I wasn't home when the babies fledged, but some weeks later when I looked out in the yard, four fat brown speckled birds, their feathers tinged with blue, slurped at the bird bath. 

And what do you know? Just now as I let the dogs outside, I see Mama Bluebird again, her head peering quickly into the box.


Joy abounds. Yes I can do just such a thing.