The Dove Egg

I have seen her picking twigs off the ground then flying toward my front porch. It has a small, white plastic table and chair, metal can to hold paint, my shoes, and in the corner on bricks, two angles where a garden rake hangs. Twice before, Laughing Doves, with pinkish-brown upper breasts have birthed eggs that a cat from elsewhere in the field has instinctively known to find during the night.

Now intending to look for the beginnings of a nest, reaching my hand above my head I swipe away the few twigs on the rake end, tossing them outside.

The next day, my arrival surprises the male, perched on the iron grill, and the female, on the thinnest layer rebuilt on the top of an aluminum ladder under now empty angles. Both stare at me, and I stare back. He flies off. She stays, and I enter my kitchen.

My dilemma begins. Do I remove the twigs knowing I’ll eventually find bloodied feathers from claw-scratched wings and broken shells, or do I let nature go on without human interference? I am reading Cameron Langford’s The Winter of the Fisher. In it, an Ojibway Indian, living by a wooded lake, shoots crows that eat other birds’ eggs. I take on his wisdom but cannot kill a cat, if seen.

Going out to again remove the twigs, the dove, still sitting, watches as I approach, until panicked she flies upward in the twenty foot space. I hear her wings bumbling against the bricks. Brushing off the first few twigs I feel an egg and bring it down cradled on my hand. By her cycle, she has had no time to build a thick nest; the egg was ready.

Rapidly I judge myself then rationalize. My worker comes today and has to have that ladder to paint. But my hand with human scent and there being nothing for a nest the dove would return to, her wildly flying out the grill all become conflicting thoughts of remorse and necessity, and I just stand. Time stops. I am without a plan and unable to help her. Woodenly, I walk in my compound, inspecting first the chiku—it has no intersection of branches to place an egg on nor does the neem. I push my head into the thickly clustered trailing jasmine vines desperate for a little nook and find one curved enough to hold the ending of the dove egg.

That night at ten, while standing inside the screen door of the darkened kitchen, enjoying the loud frog chorus briefly alive from recent heavy rain, a cat, following her nature (which I accept but don’t like), delicately steps though the grill door and turns in the direction of the hanging rake, until my raucous voice and clapping that cause her to look over her shoulder send her fleeing.

My realization is, “When we desire to, but cannot help in nature’s process of birth, life, and death, we may find solace for an unavoidable action in witnessing our sorrow and forgiving ourselves without guilt, which produces no change in the outcome but reveals our heart.”

More Than Trees

I remember swinging by my knees from a low branch of our copper beech—the view peculiar upside down; my mother’s next-door best friend moving because in their extra lot a hurricane had downed nearly all of the old, New England trees, leaving only a gaping absence; feeling moved by a weeping willow's grace over a small brook in a park where I took our daughters; finding peace driving by miles of stunted scrub oaks on the Mid-Cape Highway—all my life affected by trees.

                        AUGUST

Maple leaves wilt

to plastic wrap

in the tent of heat

pitched over the day.

Hidden cicadas buzz

like the back doorbell

under the thumb

of a neighbor’s child.

Beneath a tree-umbrella,

a girl rides a raft

of roots, dirt-cool,

idly rubbing the bark.*

Counseling, I listened to a client’s story in the image of a tree. What was the root cause for discomfort? By intuition I knew that what was thought to be the problem usually was not. The view that another person’s being different would be the solution seemed like cutting off a tree’s leaves one by one without results. Rather, I offered each a spiritual way of seeing by facing a transformation within (removing the root).

Paul Ferrini, channeling, writes, “If you want to understand the unconditional, look at the tree moving in the wind….The tree has deep roots and wide branches. It is fixed below, flexible above. It is a symbol of strength and surrender. You can develop the same strength of character by moving flexibly with all the situations in your life. Stand tall and be rooted in the moment. Know your needs, but allow them to be met as life knows how. Do not insist that your needs be met in a certain way. If you do, you will offer unnecessary resistance. The trunk of the tree snaps when it tries to stand against the wind.”*

Here, I look out and see a tree from every window, each my height when planted but now several taller than the roof. I’ve watched their branches whipped by monsoon rains, but they’ve withstood—reminders that they are more than trees.

My realization is, “Each of us may discover what our metaphor is that takes us beyond the knowledge of a thing to a deeper meaning.”

* used by Permission of Paul Ferrini (www.paulferrini.com).
* published in My Father’s Tomatoes Chapbook 1, 1993.

The Christmas Card

Designed and Built by EMR

Only our faces show in the photo my older daughter took where I hold my newborn first grandson with my lips softly yet firmly pressed on his small mouth.

Fifteen years later, as I round the corner of her home for my yearly, long-weekend visit, I look up the hill and see a wooden bench I don’t remember set against the shrubbery and briefly think it’s an unlikely place as the bench tilts slightly downhill.

I remember as a child breathing in the piney fragrance of our Christmas tree, the living room lamps turned off so pastel-colored globes of light softly illuminated decorations and shimmering tinsel. I remember our older daughter’s skis and the six-room doll house that their dad built for our much younger daughter under the Christmas tree years later. And then, from the time when only she and I were left living at home, I remember the quietude of night as I shoveled deep snow at ten o’clock, flakes drifting through a streetlamp’s light, and each time I straightened to rest my back, looking at the wreath and red bow on the lit front door. Many years later, visiting her for a week, now a mother herself, she had helped me buy an iPod and put on ten songs; and although it was months before Christmas, one that I had chosen was I’ll Be Home for Christmas. I was listening to it, waiting to leave for the airport and my flight to India when I heard the full line, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams,” and suddenly feeling sad, my tears had come. Seeing this, she’d wrapped her arms around me, holding on.

In India on December first, I put a pop-up crèche card, an angel, a snowman, a ceramic crèche, three elves of wood, and a circle of crystal petals on my kitchen table, adding red hibiscus on Christmas Day. At carol singing on Christmas Eve, I’m in the crowd overflowing the open porch of the prayer building into the shadows of pole lights on the upper hill. But my favorite activity has begun months before—designing a card.

I ask about the wooden bench. My oldest grandson—who has developed into a quiet, gentle conversationalist with me, initiating conversations in which I learn of what is important to him and how he sees life—tells me that he designed and made it. I couldn’t be more surprised and now understand why it’s a prominent display at the front of the home. From the gravel path I observe the practicality of the wide arms and the perfect construction. Getting a pot of his mom’s Christmas cactus, I center it on the bench and take photos, knowing I’ve found this year’s card. A thought will come much later, that Jesus was a carpenter, bringing a deeper feeling for the real meaning of Christmas, of the newborn birthed many years ago.

My realization is, “To be open to discovering others is to enrich our own lives.”