I have my own picture window now, complete with bird feeder.
Grandma fed
her chickadees
religiously, for years. Filling
a rusted coffee can with sunflower
seeds, she loaded the feeder outside
her big picture
window, daily.
Seated with binoculars
and bird book in hand,
she watched the window like a big screen TV.
A .22 leaned casually against the window frame.
She slipped its nose out
into marauding Blue Jays and other greedy types.
Her letters to me, in shaky script, described
birds
she saw and bears; often
mother bears
moving through the old
orchard on
their way to the river
with cubs in
tow.
She stopped shooting the rifle, she said,
after she accidentally shot a hole in the floor.
When a bold bear came and
stood outside the window
making eye
contact with her, she also stopped feeding the
birds.
I wanted her
to feed them anyway,
to stand her
petite frame in the wide
window,
binoculars in one hand and riffle
in the
other, like a sharp shooter in the WWII
movies Grandpa and I watched in her
living
room. I wanted food for the birds,
which were
food for her. I wanted her to keep
feeding
them.
Now I walk my own property
toting bags
of oiled, black sunflower seeds.
One by one I lower, fill, and rehang feeders.
I watch dumpy
doves, dapper
cardinals, bright yellow finches
and the greedy squirrel who
hangs upside-down by his back toes.
I lift my
children to face the window, “Look! See!,” I
say.
We’re a long way from the mountains,
though I can
see them in the distance.
I don’t
believe the bears
will find me here,
but if they do, maybe I’ll tell them
about my
Grandmother – her binoculars and gun,
her happy, well-fed chickadees.
sweet, sweet bird story, Kelly. my husband and I are the grandma and the grandpa, too. How we love the chickadees (and juncos, and housewrens, and finches…especially the goldfinches.)
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