Nesting

ByShae

It’s not unusual for me to show up at work and find bird things on my desk — photographs, books, newspaper clippings, feathers, nests. My office is avian chaos, but I don’t mind. It’s touching when the people you care about know what you love and bring offerings from their wanderings in the world.

Yesterday was a stand-out day. My friend Emily recently lost her beloved grandmother and came across several vintage bird books while sorting through her things. I found them in a little bag on my chair: A second edition Peterson’s guide, a field notebook from 1913 (complete with mysterious handwritten notes about warblers), and How to Watch Birds, by Roger Barton (1955). This last is my favorite, in part for quotes like this one:

There are several ways to keep nests or records of nests. One is to keep the nest itself, provided your wife will let you clutter up the house with them.

I would like to start a small collection of nests — entirely abandoned ones, of course. There’s an empty cabinet in the back room at Stewart’s that would be just right for it. So, even though I live in California and the Supreme Court says I can now have a wife (it’s about time), I think I will ask him if it’s okay.

Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Nana.

Similar Posts

  • Shopping Psychosis

    ByShae

    Today I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to look for a bath mat. I should have known better. BBB has the power to induce in me a confusion and delirium unique in the world of retail. It surpasses even the weirdness of IKEA. I discovered the trouble with BBB years ago, when my friend…

  • What’s Not to Love?

    ByShae

    Here in Fairfax, it’s a hot night that smells like honeysuckle. There are people in this town who look like they haven’t changed a bit since 1972, when I was six years old. These are the long-haired, wide-eyed people of indeterminate sex who come out at dusk to dance in the park, turning in circles…

  • That Is So Not What I Meant

    ByShae

    When I launched this blog in 2007 — with no intention of writing about jam — I googled “Hitchhiking to Heaven” to find out whether anyone else was already using the name. My search didn’t yield much, certainly not anything that concerned me. What I’m saying is that I didn’t find this entry in the…

  • Excerpt

    ByShae

    Down near the bottom of the crossed-out list of things you have to do today, between “green thread” and “broccoli” you find that you have penciled “sunlight.” Resting on the page, the word is as beautiful, it touches you as if you had a friend and sunlight were a present he had sent you from…

  • |

    Apricity

    ByShae

    Today on Facebook, a good friend who is caught in deep winter asked her friends for a story “about how outside their door the sun is warm, the leaves are green, and there’s fruit hanging in the trees.” The first thing I wanted to tell her was that I recently learned a new word that…