I bend down and kneel in the garden’s damp mulch, and take a closer look.

Partially hidden beneath the leaves is a fully formed bird, a beautiful wood thrush.

Its creamy breast is thrust upward as it rests on its back in the undergrowth, with its head buried beneath.

The plump belly is dabbed with brushstrokes of soft black, so vivid against the white.

Its tiny feet are rigid wires, curled as if wrapped around a perch.

The eyes are tiny, dried peppercorns.

Perfectly intact, no puncture wounds, no blood.

Just dead.

After grabbing my gloves, I lift its weightless body and take it across the lawn to bury underneath the shade of the cedar tree.

Theo trots over quickly, wanting to paw the dirt, curious, intent. I hold the little bird up to his nose and tell him not to mess with it. I wait to let the lesson sink in.

After a bit, I cut a rose from the rugosa bush and lay it across a rock that covers the loose dirt over the tiny grave.

Crouching in the morning cool, a moment, a peaceful prelude.

Death, unexpected.

Some days, the lawn feels like a prayer rug, rolled out for me, requiring my bare feet, my steady attention, my silence.

the lawn feels like a prayer rug, rolled out for me

A bow to the humility of not knowing anything really, about Nature, about bird species or bird calls, or migration patterns.

But today, a tiny wood thrush’s broken bones, with its soft breast pointed skyward, it feels like an offering.

I am witness, a kindred animal.

A simple garden task, to remove the detritus from the yard.

But still, the reality resonates, the little bird and me. We share this garden, these hopes for a little life, this small time on Earth.

I roll up my sleeves and tuck my hair behind my ear. It’s just a bird, I think.

I’m just a single animal organism myself, I think.

The grass flattens as I walk across it towards the house. My mind sifts through the material. What makes me think that I could ever be separate from this bird life, this animal, this beautiful creature so ingeniously created with such care?

It blows my mind that I am a piece of all of this, but that I habitually forget that fact, and that forgetting comes at a cost.

The loss of this small moment of connection.

My feet bare, my mind clear, my heart open.

I am a bird.

I am 10 years old. I sit at my small wooden desk that nestles under my bedroom window.

It is chunky, but solidly built, a bright lemon yellow color. My mother painted it for me.

Two drawers that pull out smoothly and one at the bottom that is deep. That’s where my really secret stuff will go.

There is a matching wooden chair that fits my bottom perfectly and nests underneath the lip of the long top drawer at my chest level.

The creamy finish is smooth – that cheery, shiny yellow motif of the smiley-face 1970s, and my mommy got it just right. It matches my smiley-face bank and the smiley-face patch sewed on the back pocket of my favorite jeans.

I love the desk to be neat, with pens and pencils lined up in the drawer and lined notebook paper tucked inside it, along with my Holly Hobby diary.

And even a box of wax seals, lined up like sticky gummy candies. They wait for my note with a fancy handle with a stamp that makes a smiley-face design.

I rest my elbows on the sturdy wooden top and stare out the window.

My babysitter Sarah lives next door and her bedroom window desk also looks directly at mine.

Sometimes at night I wait until dark, when I can see her light come on. Her room is wrapped in a gauze of purple, I can just make out her slim body moving around her room.

I want her to stop and sit down and look over at me. She is so beautiful.

I love writing letters more than anything. I write my mom and my dad and my grandparents. I leave notes everywhere – on pillows, under doors.

When I sit at the bright yellow desk there is order and completeness and clean possibility. Optimism. Even greatness!

I am yellow, like joy, like a daffodil. I want my words to fly like the pollen that is deep inside the blossom, just waiting for a breeze to whisk them into the sky. Just like that – easy – I want my words to make me a famous author.

I want my words to fly like pollen …

So I wrote that memory a long time ago, and unearthed it from boxes in the attic in a recent pandemic cleaning frenzy.

What stands out so brightly to me now is not the desk. It is this: my mother.

My mother gifting me the perfect thing, the desk. She saw how I loved to spy on people and scribble in my journal and pretend to be a journalist.

I don’t have many memories of my mom slowing down to sit with me, to just be, to simply listen. She was an ADD type and I learned early on that her focus was generally elsewhere.

But it is only now that I can fully appreciate that Mom really did see me, in her way. She saw the yellow in me.

And maybe it’s not too late to savor the tiny grain, the intention. I think of the yellow desk and how she did love me.

How much of our childhood is essentially a grasp for attention. It’s as profound, yet as simple as that. We aren’t grabbing for a thing, a gift, or any object at all. It’s a craving to be the center of the gaze.

We long for someone to look us full-on in our little faces, to stop the grown-up world for just a moment, because nothing eclipses this love.

Listen to me. I am important, I have something to say.

It sounds tiny, but when you experience it, you know it. Time slows down. There is a texture.

It is the thing that you will remember. Like the wax to the seal, the moment imprints on your heart.

This is what I mean about moments. My chicken moments.

Looking deeply at a thing. Listening, absorbing the gaze, or gazing deeply at someone else.

Anyway, this morning I watch the buttery yellow pullets make a run for the yard after the nighttime roost in the coop. I love their happy clucks and chortles of surprise, like its a brand new world out here.

They seem to forget that they know this place – and what happened yesterday. I wonder if they have a memory.

I wonder if they dream?

Maybe they dream of a long ago forest, and of an ancient time when they were free to hunt and scurry and lay eggs. When they would plump down underneath mother’s thick breast into soft grasses, when darkness covered the deep thickets at dusk. When they were vulnerable but still safe from predators.

I wonder if they dream of what it felt like to be wild.

Wild thoughts, memories, chicken dreams.

In the mornings I splash milk into my coffee mug and walk, barefoot, across the stone path to the chicken coop.

I sit on an upended clay pot (my throne) and watch as the young pullets kick and scratch and poke their beaks into the same old dirt.

For months I’ve found myself doing the same, going over and over tired ground.

Since the pandemic, I’m like my chickens. Stuck inside, I find myself sifting through over-picked brain material, my thoughts ruminating, enclosed in a singular pen, my own cramped hen house.

Last night the rain brought a deep drench to the run. A leafy chicken mulch smorgasbord. The water brought new material to the surface for the girls to mull over. A bright grain of corn, the squiggle of a green worm, the measured drink of brown water.

It blows my mind how content they are to retread the same small patch over and over. They see the miniscule changes to the earth, fresh bugs, mildewed straw, whatever gets churned up. A cicada!

I love that these fluffy dunderheads are so simply satisfied and able to keep a gimlet eye on the moment.

It’s nothing truly new, or interesting even, it’s just a focused gaze.

But the single grain is nourishment, a kernel of sustenance. A cluck, a breath, a hustle into the morning sunshine.

It’s like my writing. There’s this inward and outward vista, always a choice, always available.

There are days I can go so deep in memory and reflection, one nibble of detritus at a time. Other days I’d prefer the nesting box, a nap, a forgetting.

But chickens remind you of survival, they’re little dinosaurs. And I share this too – the inherited instinct to keep scratching, to keep hunting and pecking. I’m built to cluck and fuss and find my little strut.

My sister says chickens are stupid – “bird-brains” – after all, and in a way she’s right. But they’re prehistoric, built to survive, which is more than I can say about our species at the moment.

Anyway, it’s not Man against Nature out here today, but it’s what I do. I write. I pick at the neglected patches of dusty yard, weedy and dry.

I tell myself, this chicken yard has just enough wildness and disorder to make stuff grow, even chickens.