Hope is the thing with feathers

Dear reader,

A week ago, my boys were walking home from the bus stop when my younger son heard a sound that made his ears perk up. It wasn’t a cricket, that much he knew, but it wasn’t as loud as the birds we usually hear in our little urban oasis of a neighborhood.

By then he was standing in front of our house, tuning his eyes and ears to the precise location of the sound — that’s when he spotted a baby bird, lying nearby in a patch of grass.

We suspected the chick had fallen out of the large oak tree in between our house and our neighbor’s house. Although I didn’t think the little creature stood much chance of survival, death wasn’t in the realm of possibility for the animal-loving human I call my son.

“Mom! I need a box! I need grass! And dirt! And stuff to stuff inside!” He called out directions, and within minutes, an old Amazon box had become the fledgling’s home — a pluck of crab grass, a couple of twigs, and a sprig of lavender (for scent purposes, he said) the coziest of bedding.

My boy grabbed a step stool from the kitchen along with a roll of masking tape. Soon enough, he was yelling for a hammer and nails instead — bigger nails, not the wimpy kind! — and for another handful of crab grass.1

Meanwhile, I sent a text to our neighbor:

Hi! [My boy] found a baby bird on the ground …which is now nailed to the tree out front because he read that putting it in a shoebox higher up in a tree might help the mama bird find its baby and bring it back to the nest. Anyways, that’s why there’s a box there😬

The step stool stayed near the front door so he could check on the nestling’s progress. Had the mama grabbed her? Was she safely home yet? Was she doing okay?

Meanwhile, I eyed the door with a grimace on my face, not unlike the emoji I sent our neighbor. While he expected life, I awaited death. I prepared for the inevitable sobs I knew would come when her little body ceased to move.

I didn’t need the death of another beloved creature, not for this boy.

This last August, upon my son’s eleventh birthday, when it came to birthday wishes, all he wanted was a dog — a small dog he could hold and snuggle in his lap, a dog to call his very own. Absolutely not, my husband said, because are we really a two-dog family? Who’s really going to care for that second dog? By the time I started scoping out the SPCA website, we were already goners, so when another neighbor’s new-to-her dog, Fozzie, didn’t work out because the miniature Schnauzer, it turns out, was a bit of a terror to her three cats, she reached out to see if Fozzie might want to live with us. Despite the fact that Fozzie thought our dining room table was perfect for marking his territory and he was more keen on snuggling with me than with the boy who called him his own, it was mostly a match made in heaven. Which is why when that damn dog escaped from the backyard nearly two months later and darted across the street and got thumped by not one, but two cars in a row, I didn’t want the death of another beloved creature, not for that boy.

So when I say that I didn’t want the baby bird to die, because I knew what it would do to my son and I didn’t want that pain for him again, can I also point out that death was never a part of his story, never a factor in his mind?

He just kept holding onto hope.

Later that evening, after I’d posted a short video on Instagram, another neighbor2 texted to say that she’d recently walked through a baby bird rescue with her nephews. Would we like her help?

Yes, yes we would.

Soon enough, the pair had taken the box down from the tree and brought it inside to start the warming process. My boy soaked a couple bits of dog kibble in water, no sooner feeding the bird with a pair of tweezers and naming it Patricia — because, yes, he named the bird Patricia, a perfectly noble name for the new lady in our house. He cupped her in his hands and held her by the space heater on the kitchen counter and mostly heeded my advice to wash his hands again, already. Then, unbeknownst to me, he stayed up with her until midnight, just to make sure she’d be okay.

And you know what? She was okay.

The next morning, as I gulped down mouthfuls of coffee and bounced my head in syncopated rhythm to the gentle chirps of the Patricia-bird, my son steadied that little hopeful thing with feathers for her new home at the Ohlone Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

I held my breath the whole way to the humane society, praying a please don’t die please don’t die please don’t die kind of desperation-prayer because I still couldn’t wrap my head around that thing called hope, the same one “That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -”3 the very same one my boy didn’t doubt one bit.

Handing the Amazon box over to the kind lady at the front desk, we said goodbye to Patricia, who was promptly placed under the warmer and named “68.”

As per you and me, might we cling to hope, the thing with feathers — maybe just a little bit more today than we did a week ago.

Be a hopepunk with me?

c.