Sunday afternoon as I sat working on my computer at the patio table, I heard a ruckus behind me, a small explosion in the dead leaves I had minutes earlier swept neatly against the chain-link fence with my new broom. What made this sudden noise? I watched as it happened again. Leaves scattered, and a robin hopped backwards, yanking something from the ground. Had she surprised a worm? Was she after a necessary piece of twig or bark for her nest? Just seven inches tall, she had dislodged an amount of yard detritus equal to herself in volume.
But she was not satisfied. She hadn’t found what she wanted. She hopped to her left, to the next interval between hostas and weeds and tried it again. She dug her head into the pile and pulled back hard, throwing leaves and dust and odd bits of this and that into the air, then ducked back in to inspect the ground and get what was there for her. She flew off when a squirrel chased across the patio cement, but was back at it, again and again, a few minutes later.
So much energy and purpose under those plain brown wings, that small brown head, and the red breast. She was light on her feet, light in every way, feathers puffed dry and weightless over hollow bird bones. Of course she could fly, but what a disrupter she was on the ground, connected to a purpose, a task, the thing that robins are wired to do in the spring.
I went back to my work, pulling quotes and ideas together into sentences, yanking on them, testing their truth, clearing away the clutter, searching for how to say it. Flew off (to Twitter!) for a few minutes, then back at it, doing the work God put in front of me.
Photo: "robin in garden, 15 April 2011" by mwms1916 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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