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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