In my corner of the world, in the beginning moments of the day, the sun starts to sort of wake up, and rub the sleep out of its eyes. Our star then starts to stumble around in the east as if in search of a pair of clean pants to wear, then finally after about an hour of early morning struggle it then shows it face over the crest of the Rocky mountains. It is under the shadow of these mountains that I first learned what death was.
Though the brisk early morning spring air bit my cheeks, on a spring morning in my 7th year, I departed from the stone house my family called home. Into the gray light of the early morning started down the road which my family simply called the hill. School is at the bottom and like water I simply flow down towards the building almost as if unseen rocks or roots decided for me which way to go, and the force of gravity pulled me on.
The first sign of life that morning came from the trill of a bird song in a very gargantuan tree above me. As I apathetically glanced towards it, a blood-red blur zoomed past me and landed on a much smaller aspen tree near me. The first bit of color I seemed to be able to see was the rouge colored feathers of the mother Robin's breast as she sang on a branch near me.
This is a sight I had seen a million times, but this morning the familiar sight was accompanied by an extraneous one. A little nest rested on the very same branch the robin was on. This isn't the first time I have seen a nest.
Throughout my life I often recall my earliest actual memory of a bird's nest. A bird had built her nest into our cold grey cinder block wall and as a very young child I recall climbing up onto our ‘78 skyblue ford pickups hood, because it was always parked in front of this wall. And peering
down into the gaping mouths of 6 or seven little fledglings.
So as i watched the nest on the aspen tree, the mother suddenly departed again. I was eager for a new opportunity to see the miracle of life. So I climbed up the tree, the anticipation was broken momentarily by the absence of cries for mother. But I was on a mission and I was determined to complete it. So I continued to climb, I was only mildly concerned about an angry mother bird clawing my eyes out to protect her nest. But my concern washed away from me as I finally climbed above the nest and saw one little blue egg. Smaller than my thumbnail and absolutely magical.
I was captivated by this little blue egg, I had never seen a blue egg which I did not make that way. And so small. It looked like candy I would have received on easter. I understood on an unspoken level that inside that egg was a baby bird. Or at least the beginnings of one. And my arrogant human brain did not trust a wild bird who had only moments ago abandoned this miracle from heaven to care for it and raise it for its own.
So I took it, to my great eternal shame, believing that I would be a suitable mother. I scooped it into the palm of my hand and began to climb down the tree. Sometime before i reached the bottom i had unknowingly crushed the egg, ever so slightly, because when i took it out to check on it. I was distraught to discover a little bit of blood trickling out of the shell.
Being only a few 100 yards away from the school I rushed the little egg into my teacher and pleaded with her to help me. I knew the other class had an incubator and thought if we could hatch the thing it would heal and be my eternal friend.
I placed a burden on my teacher that day which I now appreciate. She had to explain to me for the first time in my life, what death was. I intimately understood death. I wept bitterly as she helped me inter the creature into the ground outside, and she gave me permission to run home and explain to my parents what happened.
Four generations of bird songs were lost by my hand. And that number increases every five years. This realization has always instilled me with a sense that I have a responsibility to fill the world with greater than, or equal, goodness of a birds song, and I have strived to do so ever sense.
