Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Family Visits

Spirit Birds

I remembered my grandmother's tales in which the souls of the departed took on the shape of birds to visit close ones.”
Adele Kafian (The Last Days of Katherine Mansfield, Parabola, Winter 2017, p.97)

We were sitting on her screened porch on a bright summer day. My writing partner, Ellen, and I meet each week to discuss what we're writing. She is about to embark on another non-fiction venture, and I am trying to accumulate six years of blog posts into a daily reader. On this particular day, I was telling her about a dream that started me writing in a serious fashion. Bear with me, because I've reported this dream before.

I had been writing an article for the monthly church newsletter for years, but had not considered writing on a broader scale. In the dream, I am asked about something I had written; “Do you remember the one about the red birds on the roof?” In the dream I look to my right and see two pairs of cardinals sitting on a terracotta slate roof. “Yes,” I say, though in reality I had never written about red birds on a roof. “Have you written anything lately?” I stumble a bit because the questions are coming from a gigantic man in a cowboy hat who's sitting on the other side of the steering wheel of my car. “Yes, I have written a couple of things,” I lie. “Can I buy them from you?” he asks. “No, that won't be necessary. I'll just give them to you.” That giant man turned out to be Andy Devine. (To my mind, Divine!) That's how I began writing this blog and giving it away.

So, while I was telling Ellen this story, a bird kept singing extravagantly in a nearby tree—so loudly, it could not be ignored. She recounted to me, still pondering the dream, that her father had always loved cardinals; had kept feeders filled with the black sunflower seeds they love in his garden. As she told me about her father's love of gardening and cardinals, the singing bird flew to the gardenia bush right next to the porch, and continued its loud trill, now drowning out conversation. I looked to see what it might be, and of course, it was a male cardinal. I said to her, “Your father's come to visit you.” As soon as I said that, the bird flew away.

I know it's almost Halloween, but this is not a ghost story. It's a true story, and there are many other stories like it, in which a bird visits a human being, in close relationship to the death of a loved one. Ellen's father has been deceased for about a decade, but I've no doubt that the cardinal was his spirit, come to say, “all is well with me.” The story written by Adele Kafian for Parabola, from which the quote above was drawn, was also a true story about Katherine Mansfield, a New Zealand author, who died in 1923, at the age of 35. In Kafian's story, shortly after Mansfield's death, a small red-breasted bird flew in through a window, circled above her in the corridor, and flew out again.

We will celebrate All Saint's Day soon. Perhaps you will receive a visit from one of your loved ones who's gone. I hope you like birds.

                                                             In the Spirit,

                                                                 Jane

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