Water Trinkets

The crows regularly leave things in the horses’ water buckets —

Nuts, acorns, bones, the occasional juvenile turtle.

At first I thought they were accidentally dropping them in, flying over and losing their grip and returning to their nests crestfallen with the realization they had lost their treasure, like when my son gets to daycare and realizes he left his favorite toy car at home.

I looked it up one day and it turns out that sometimes they stash their food in water to hide it, or to soak it to make it easier to eat later.

I’m a person who chronically struggles to have faith, who generally lacks trust that things will turn out the way I need them (despite so much real-life evidence that they often do) and who would never dream of leaving something I liked in a random container of water, fully trusting it to still be there when I got back. I’m too anxious and over-functioning to give away control over my possessions to the unknown.

But the crows aren’t. Every day I dump out the horses’ water buckets and refill them, washing the crows’ soggy tidbits onto the ground where the outgoing water scatters it into the hoofprints and valleys in the sand. And despite their constant mysterious disappearance, the crows still trustingly submerge them every day.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that; maybe there isn’t. After all, I’m the villain in the crows’ story. But I like to imagine what it would be like to trust the process so thoroughly.

Then again, maybe, in the layer closest to my core, below my layer of skepticism, I do have an undercurrent of their spirit. Something I was born with before life got vicious and taught me to recoil and self-protect. The part of me that still picks myself up and keeps going and trying to make a meaningful life, no matter what’s been taken from me.

Maybe each piece I write is like a piece of treasure dropped into the water bucket of time, left to percolate with the faith that it will still somehow remain whole and retrievable when my nest is empty; and be taken as evidence that I was once here, alive and hungry and collecting trinkets of wisdom as I went.