I belong to the Oregon Birding group. I have loved it and will post one of the pictures here. This is what Facebook is for isn’t it? To share our passions.
This morning I was looking through some old pictures, stuff I’ve been carting around for years: letters, flyers, birthday cards from 1972, postcards never sent with pictures I really like. You know the stuff.
In this mass of paper, I found a tribute to my mother. She cut out pictures of birds and framed them. She saved quotations on bits of paper that she found compelling. She had a particular drawer in her pantry that held matches, rubber bands, buttons, thread and string and these bits of paper that she’d cut out of books or magazines or the newspaper with quotes that she loved. Over the years you could follow her life through these quotes—from trying to cope with a difficult marriage, to finding solace in her faith, to dealing with the death of a beloved daughter, to trying to find peace and harmony and beauty in any way she could.
Here is one that sang to me this morn:
“A birdless world…is unthinkable. To be without birds would be to suffer a kind of colorblindness…over one of the planets’ special brightnesses.”
I think she loved the little birds best, but I’m not really sure. Here’s one she would have loved:
This is the Pacific Slope Flycatcher. What an awkward name for a sweet little bird, but, hell, I didn’t name him.
I’d call him the Jeanbird in honor of my mother.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 