Sunday

9 April 2017

— the grass and moss yet dew heavy

Good Morning All, 

Mind you, yesterday’s green finches were not my first experience with unexplained bird behavior. Nor am I the only one. The word auspicious, for example, meaning good omen, comes from the Latin word auspcium, which translates: divination by observing the flights of birds. The Romans believed that seeing birds fly by on one's righthand side foretold good fortune.

Think of how widely and deeply birds feature in our culture. Doves, crows, ravens, robins, vultures, magpies storks, owls, and others to which we attribute character and symbolic meaning. 

It’s nearly fifteen years ago now since I lost Britta and my memories have faded some, but during the first six months after she set off I probably had a hundred moments when bird behaved either unnaturally or supernaturally. Britta, of course, knew about my fondness for birds, so … maybe … possibly … there was some connection.

Here are three instances:

The day before Johs and Holly and I held our Memorial Service for Britta in our backyard, we’d gone to a park the four of us had often walked in. We sat on a bench under a beech tree. A blå meiser, a blue tit, a small and beautiful bird with a yellow vest, a bandit’s mask around its eyes, and a blue cap and blue wing feathers, sat on a branch above us. Not very much above us, such that I noticed its proximity. 

Holly got up after a while and went to stand under another beech maybe fifty feet from us. It may be that she was crying and did not want to add her distress to ours. The bird on the branch flew over and took up a position on a branch above her, then hopped down a branch, then fluttered and flew back to the branch above Johs and me. In fact, it did this four times. After the fourth time, Holly returned to our bench. The bird returned to its perch and sat there for ten minutes or so until we got up and headed back to the car.

After the Memorial service and the kids had flown back to America, after one of the first days I’d been back at work in the school, driving home, coming up the last hill before turning off onto our dirt road, I was dreading in that heavy leaden inner sense the prospect of entering into our now silent and empty house. It was while I was in the midst of that dread that six magnificent swans flying in formation seemed to materialize out of nowhere (or more likely because I had not been paying attention), heading from my left to righthand side, and swooping over my windshield so low I could hear the flutter and thump of their great wings. I did not know why there were six. I did not know where they were coming from or where they were going to. What I did know, was that my dread had lifted and now it would not be so bad to enter again into the house and home where we had been for so long so happy.

Some weeks later, after many more of these incidents, when I had come to more-than-half-believe Britta was using the birds to communicate with me, I was late for school, heading the other way down the same road where I'd seen the swans. I knew I was going too fast, but knew the road. At the bottom of the hill was a sharp curve into a small village. There was also a house with a tall hedge. As I passed the hedge, three sparrows in the hedge flew past my windshield, not four inches above the windshield. Because I had never experienced that, not with sparrows, I took my foot off the gas, slowed some, and said aloud, “Okay, Britta, what are you trying to tell me now?” And around the tight corner of the narrow road, in the very middle of the narrow road, was a girl of seven or eight in a pink dress on a pink bicycle wobbling along. I literally stood on the brake. The car came to a stop two feet short of the girl. Had those sparrows not crossed my windshield I’d have hit her for sure. For sure. 

You tell me, Horatio.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron