Mortal

 Here I am drinking beer in the back yard, late afternoon on a warm day in October. I've got 22 minutes until sundown, which might be kind of a metaphor for treasuring warmth and light on the way to a COVID winter. 

I've been a little freaked out this week by dead birds. Specifically a perfectly formed but stone-cold dead sparrow that was lying on my back steps Tuesday afternoon when my daughter and I left the house. We hurried on to the garage, only to discover that the automatic garage door opener was not working. Fortunately it had only been a couple months since I'd unwedged the service door from whatever it had been stuck on for a couple years, so I was able to go inside and raise the door. When I came back home, alone, I picked up the dead bird with a plastic grocery bag and deposited it in the empty garbage cart out back. It clunked when it hit the bottom. I also called the garage door repair company, using the number on the well-worn sticker on the pegboard inside the garage.

So the broken gear in the opener was fixed on Wednesday morning. All should have been well. 

This afternoon I brought my laptop outside to do some writing in the fall sunshine and the seventy-degree weather. I went to pull a chair up to the table and a bird, a sparrow, lying on its back twitched out from underneath the chair frame. It was paralyzed on one side, helpless, breathing, and struggling to move. I went inside for a few minutes, came back out, looked again. The bird seemed still, dead. I thought, because I had seen it alive, it was too sacred to pick up with a plastic grocery bag and drop into the trash. So I got a shovel from the garage and dug a hole near the forsythia bush, working my way through some tough roots to go six or even eight inches down. I went back to pick up the bird with the shovel — I'm sadly squeamish. I cannot tenderly pick up the creature in my own naked hands, despite last week reading a lovely nature writer's story about holding such a dead bird in her tender hands. I scraped the shove on the pavement and the bird moved again, twitched across the patio a few inches, frightened or reflexively enlivened by the sound, the action, the threat.

I know this bird will die. But I couldn't think of burying it alive. I know that a country person, a person with a better heart for animals, someone else — would know how to kill it, how to put it out of its misery. But what to do? Smash it with the shovel? I imagined how awful the smashed bird would look. I imagined it not dying even then and me needing to smash it again and again. 

So I left it. I sat down to do my work, talk on the phone, drink my beer with the dying sparrow just beyond my peripheral vision. I made one more attempt with the shovel about twenty minutes ago, but again the sparrow had enough life, enough movement to skitter and flip a fewinches across the patio into the dirt. It may be breathing still, even now — though perhaps I'm done with looking. 

God's eye is on that sparrow. 

I guess I'm there, too, though only in God's peripheral vision. Mortal, yet so uncomfortable with mortality.