Hope on a Dark Day

Here is a small thing.

Outside my kitchen window, there are three finch feeders.  One of my favorite things is to stand at the kitchen sink and watch the gold finches eat and frolic. Today, though, as I worked my way through a sink of dirty dishes, there was a thunk at the living room window, a few feet away. A thunk, and then silence.

I dread that thunking sound. It usually means that a bird has flown into the window.  I have decals on those windows, the kind that are supposed to keep the birds away. These decals are dumb and do not work. I pulled the curtain aside and saw a small finch splayed on the ground. He was mostly still. I hated to look.

This was a little too much for me, on a day when the news from Houston was overwhelmingly sad, the images of water, water, and more water, and people dying as the water kept rising. Also, it was the first time I had been home in two days, the previous nights spent at my Mom’s, caring for her and dealing with the aggressive brain tumor that will most likely take her life. On this day, I did not want to see a beautiful bird dead on the ground by my front windows, drawn to my yard in the first place by the feeders we put out for his well-being. It felt, in a small way, like it was my fault.

It wasn’t the first time a bird had flown into our windows.  They generally die; it’s hard to recover from that kind of blow.   This bird was still twitching, though. Twitching and probably in pain.

Except.

He was breathing. My cat scratched at the door, wanting to go out.

“No way,” I said.  “As long as that bird is out there with life in him, you are staying inside.”

Minutes passed. I kept peeking out the window.  Each time, I hoped that he would be gone, that somehow he would have miraculously improved enough to fly away.  Honestly, I didn’t think this would happen. I kept checking anyway.

And then, during one of my compulsive checks, there was a change. The bird was sitting up.  I looked twice to make sure.  He was sitting up and resting.

That was most unexpected.

I told my son. “The bird that was out there, seemingly dead? He just sat up.”

The best news of all? The next time I looked outside?

He was gone.

Hallelujah and hallelujah.

Now, I know that sometimes birds appear to recover after they hit windows, but still sustain internal injuries, and go on to die later.

I’m going to trust, though, that this bird was different.

I was sure that he was dead. But then, somehow, he was alive again. Which just reminds me that things are not always as they appear, which is good news indeed, and that even when death seems certain, sometimes life sneaks in through the back door.  And honestly? Always, in the end, it’s life that wins. We don’t always get to see it, though.  Today, I did.  I am so grateful for that. Today, for one small bird outside my living room window, life had the last word.