ROBINS

Child,
Your Mom fiercely defends the robin's nest outside our back door. Cats prowl our neighborhood by the hundreds and treat our back step like stadium seating for the baby bird snack show. Or they used to, until your Mom, armed only with a jug of water and an eagle eye, started to intervene. Cats melt away at her furious glance.

We are a family bound with birds. When I courted your mother I gave her falcon feathers, a gift of fierceness. In the minutes before I left her side for a year, from North Carolina for Korea, your mother and I freed a duck snagged on discarded fishing line. Its symbolism may be drawn from a made-for-TV movie, but I hold that small act as significant.

We were both watchful over the doves that nested in our Asheville spider plant. In Thailand we rescued bedraggled sparrows from rainy buckets in our courtyard. And now a family of robins nests outside our backdoor, twittering nervously at the parade of well fed felines that wander by.

There were four blue blue eggs and now there are four scrawny pink chicks that peep feebly when the parents swoop down with their beaks full of worms. Today I saw the first nestlings poking their heads up, beaks open to yellow gullets, vying to be the first fed.

The robin parents have grown accustomed to our comings and goings. They still fly off when we walk out the door, but they settle nearby on the gutter and wait patiently for us to go a few feet away before returning to the nest. I don't know what they think of me and my awkward attempts at one-handed photography, as I try to document their lives with my battered camera and a battered makeup mirror. Nobody likes a nosy neighbor.

I think your Mom's fierce defense of the robin family is a fierce defense of you. There is something essentially hopeful about a family of birds nesting outside your window. You can't help but want to protect them from predators and injustice. We worry for their first flights, like we will worry for your first flights. We know, but don't say aloud, that we can't protect against every risk. It's the scariest thing in the world.

We watch in wonder, grateful witnesses to life's rich pageantry.

Pa-