Fragility in your palm

Sometimes I think the best way to understand the fragility of life is to hold a bird in your hands.
Kids with poultry projects in 4-H know what I mean. So does anyone who ever held a baby chick at Easter time.
That thought came back to me a few weeks ago when Libby Davidson stopped by the office to share some pictures she had taken.
She had rescued a baby hummingbird from the mouth of a cat. And while it didn’t survive, it lived long enough for Libby to hold the tiny thing in the palm of her hand.
Flipping through the snapshots, I immediately flashed back to an incident in my childhood.
It was a summer afternoon, and there were some workmen involved in a project at our house. Maybe they were roofing. They were doing something around our garage when one of the guys called me over.
I was probably about 12 at the time.
The guy had his hands cupped and closed.
“Hold out your hands,” he said. “And be ready to keep them closed.
I did as I was told, and he deposited a live hummingbird in my waiting palms.
Its heart seemed to be beating a million times a minute.
Its wings fluttered against my skin.
And when I opened my hands it buzzed out, circled us a few times, then zipped across the lawn and out of sight.
“There’s nothing like it,” said Libby, snapping me back to reality as we stood at the front counter of the newspaper office.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” I agreed.
That hummingbird in the back yard wasn’t the first bird I’d ever held in my hands.
On the way to school in the fourth grade, I encountered an injured blue jay.
At the urging of my older sister, I picked it up, took it home, put it in a cardboard box, and took it to Paul Macklin, my teacher at Judge Haynes Elementary School.
The jay, which never really had a name, was a resident of the classroom for several days. We banded it, recorded its banding in some sort of journal the teacher kept, and tried to nurse it back to health.
Eventually, after a few miscues, it made its way back into the sky.
Like the hummingbird, it disappeared.
But both left something behind, a bit of understanding — wisdom would be too strong a word for it — an appreciation of the world beyond the self-absorbed concerns of child and of how fragile the whole thing is.[[In-content Ad]]