It might look like the husband is feeding wifey a worm. Actually, that’s the hook for our outdoor blind behind him. What he was up to right then was giving his mate food from his own tummy. Such a romantic gesture, yes?

Twice now I’ve watched the food delivery by the husband to wifey; Tim observed it, too, and he smiled when I pointed out that at least all the things he himself went through during my prenatal periods did not include regurgitating seeds into my mouth.

I very much enjoy the tuneful finch husband.

I’ve learned enough from the helpful information highway to confidently state he and wifey are House Finches. A bit disappointing it was to find they are the most common of finches, rather than some exotic species seeking us out. But I’ll take them. It is perhaps interesting to note (though Wikipedia has yet to document) the fact that I go all motherly toward almost any creature coming under my roof (or, in this case, under my eaves). This has applied to rats, snakes, and a duck, besides the more conventional dogs and cats.

As might be inferred by the blue sky background (in Western Oregon — gasp!), our days have been the kind that surge the mercury and the human husband’s instinct to tend to outdoor work, such as keeping the sun off our west-facing walls. Saturday Tim was out lowering blinds, except for one. This isn’t the first time, by the way, Tim has adjusted his efficiency for the sake of family members. Our bedroom’s window-to-the-west no longer has a blind over it at all, so I can view the yard while treadmilling. Though once in a while a small sigh escapes him, my male of the species takes the cares of others to heart.

Sunday afternoon I read a book on a baking-stone-warm back step, my spine against the door. (Believe me, if I were in charge of blinds and so on, they would not be lowered each year until I had at least broken a sweat in or outside the house.) I noted wifey finch in her nest, keeping, hopefully, the correct temperature for herself and any eggs she may have laid by this point.

I hadn’t heard the husband since the day before, when it looked like a few other birds (swooping sparrows and a raspy jay) were in the area specifically to aggravate our finch couple. The husband had seemed to be drawing them off. Now the yard appeared quiet. Maybe too quiet. Maybe something had happened to the father of those fledglings-to-be.

I took a long look at our Dear Sweet Westley lounging on the deck. As far as I know, he hasn’t caught a birdie in ages, but in his prime he was quite the terror of the winged community. One year I even bought him a fancy bib meant to curb his hunting sense. Westley came home a week or so later sans bib, looking proud of himself, and soon after that he brought a woodpecker in to release it in James’s room for an exciting morning. That, however, was years ago.

Still, the empty wire and the silence worried me. Was our little wifey now a single parent? Who would help her? Would she abandon the nestlings and would I have to hear their pitiful peeps and…

Early this morning I saw him, across the yard on a different wire. Soon he was giving wifey her post Mother’s Day breakfast-in-nest. I was ever so happy.

I denied that could happen, and then I looked. Defying my published blog-post certainty, there seemed the possibility of a real nest. Wifey bird’s pointed look in my direction said, plainly, Don’t be hasty; we might pull it off this year.

This morning after a quick Windex job I updated our finchy photos. The couple had been gone since yesterday’s warm afternoon, but they reappeared early, the husband bird chittering and twirpering from the wire above, while wifey shopped the garden’s choice fabrics and brought each one up to weave in.

My camera-nosiness may have bugged her; in any case the two conferred for a bit before I left the area.

The difference this year — if there is one, if this couple’s endeavor isn’t following the same pattern as their forebears’ — if there is a difference, it may be that the blind near the kitchen window has a deeper “well” behind the rolled up part. In past springs the birds have always tried to build on the other blind near our bedroom. At any rate their production is looking more nestish today.

I find interesting our family nest population’s differing attitudes toward the finches. Daughter Victoria muses about the local ecosystem, how of course the major disrupter and shaper of that system is suburban humankind. And yet, she notes, to be a small enough animal that you don’t get in the humans’ path means to be able to take advantage of a secure place, away from cats and raccoons while inaccessible to crows. (I remind her that this nest, if it holds, will definitely be in one human’s path — her father’s. Victoria leaves a note on the refrigerator calling for no touching of the outdoor kitchen blind.)

Son James scans with interest the particular weeds brought up to the nest by wifey finch. He pulled those weeds and deposited them in precise areas per his adventure with backyard permaculture. Yet he seems to bear no ill will toward the natural home-builders out there.

Husband Tim, readying himself for work, mentions that the blind can move a lot in a stiff breeze. (But his expression upon reading Victoria’s note is one of resignation.)

For my part I continue pondering the picture of unwittingness seen in the birds who build in front of our window. Is it possible, one bird may ask its partner, that from another dimension (another sort of dwelling) beings could be viewing us at work here? That they might enjoy us, root for us, or alternatively seek to harm us? Certainly those sorts of finchy questions would be quelled by a reminder that it’s not polite to bring up either politics or heretical housing paradigms.

On the other hand — maybe in a truly better sense — I look wifey finch in the eye and cheer her. I think about attempts I’ve made to build that always have, from one perspective or another, failed. I wonder what this newest try by our feathered couple might portend.

They’re back again this year. Probably the offspring of the offspring of the offspring. The male, his head a shade of sunset, perks his face at me, startled inside my kitchen window. A dark flutter of wings. They are attempting, as one pair of them always does, to build a nest on our rolled-up outdoor window blind.

The female perches there most often, tilting gray head, puffing patterned torso feathers. She appears the more intent on making this happen, making it work. But the rolled-up blind is only the width of maybe a double-sized paper towel roll. While I realize a tree branch is narrower still, I note the forked structure up in a maple, the lending of stability by natural woody abundance.

It simply must look so darn good to her. The inner side of the vinyl blind, shaded against the house. Perfect protection, she must think. Stability. Little hubby birdie perhaps casts a dubious eye at first, but she insists. No, I want this place.

Today a wad of grasses bunches beside her, nestish. Yet not. Even I from my human kingdom can recognize, as I always do, that it doesn’t measure up to the extent of quality necessary. The shelf is too narrow. Little she-bird, I know you know this, but you putz about, unwilling to admit it aloud inside yourself just now. After all this labor.

Boy, I understand that. I’ll feel it with you, a tiny throat lump after you’re gone, when final forlorn, twiggy grass-decor slides to the ground. Will you notice, though, I wonder, from your sturdy nest amid apple blossoms, my husband bustling out there, releasing the cord and lowering the blind in a sure movement to shade our window without guile? Leaving stable foundations to the arbors.

Thoughts about childhood remind me of those days before any of us little kids got the concept of teenagerhood. It was right around the corner, yet acres and acres away.

As a group we bunched and separated, individually confident until the next round with gravity, with marred knees and bandaids and a mommy’s kiss. We didn’t know the coming knowledge that was just a surge around that corner. Sometimes, though, we acted it out. Playing daddies and mommies with soft blankets’ bundles and cookies in an easy-bake oven. Weddings on the sidewalk, giggles and petals, nary a kiss-the-bride.

Those who stood in doorways watching us little kids could not explain the mystery to our satisfaction in terms of reality. They could answer questions with directness and ease (the best of them did), but they knew they couldn’t make us understand, that side of puberty, what they knew on their side.

If little kid-ness had a longer shelf life, those in doorways might have been audience to more than shouted theories by my neighborhood’s show-offs in tennies. What if tiny scholars amongst us had had time to write dissertations, teach seminars, build paradigms? Debates on where babies come from might have commenced every spring. Some groups of thought would have been dismissed, some laughed at, some heralded as most likely true.

And then, as truly happened, things would have changed. Differently for everyone, yet the same shift, while those in doorways watching in love would see our dawning understanding, our sheepish shrugs, the same as took place the generation before.

These days I wonder about those gazing at me from doorways I don’t yet comprehend. Even if they could answer my questions, they couldn’t make me understand what is evident, has been for a while, from their side. I trust some of them are waiting, soft chuckles in their throats, for things to change.

Not absurd in the same sense that an expiration date on the package bottom of my cat’s kibble treats is absurd.

Not absurd in the sense that all political machinations are absurd.

Not even absurd in the sense that my fleeting desire to comment on blogs and state my case and defend myself and say so, there, ha! is absurd.

It’s the sense of absurdity (for lack of the better word I haven’t yet discovered) I felt decades ago at college, when Grandma Edna would invite me for a Sunday afternoon drive, I would tell her I had midterms to study for, and she’d promise to get me home soon. After three, maybe four hours into her possession, having visited the Coburg truck stop to meet Uncle Jim, a pause at somebody’s Aunt Irmine’s place, and detours down alleys I’d never known existed, Grandma Edna would realize she needed to be sure and pick up my cousin in Roseburg (an hour away south) by 5:00, and the bus back to campus would put me there no later than six, she was certain, so here you go, big smiles, Bye, Darlin’. Of course my day would be shot. But of course I could only grin a small grin in something like amazement.

I mean, somehow I recognized that soon I would forget most every informational tidbit my midterm would show I had memorized. Yet the days with Grandma Edna, the wondrous absurdity of her joy while unintentionally restructuring my plans, and her wide-brimmed black hat’s tilt atop her pearly hair, would always remain with me.

The love in Grandma Edna’s smile and the fullness of adventures we had encountered surrounded me with a quality of joy — an illumination. I saw the amazing absurdity of living real life.

Maybe I experienced the tiniest smidge of what I sense Jesus gave Himself over to — being in the moment, being footsore, carrying crippled children, waiting for an apostle to pack loaves of bread baked by women dwelling at the edge of town.

My current Sunday mornings are like this. Absurd in the fullness of old ladies’ embraces and kisses, and of tiny children toddle-stepping/dancing, drawn to the Nave’s front, their baby running shoes lighting up pink neon, their mothers like zephyrs inevitably behind them, their bright faces toward an altar, a communion of souls with reality.

Not used to snowstorms, I loved the change. The easy banter on social networks — something to say! But what will nature do to us? New growth chilled. Ah, only for those two days. Amazing how so much springs back.

Yet last week my heart had lifted at the sight of Rosewood Avenue’s “popcorn tree,” its snowy blossoms captivating.

Today it is no more.

Since the Gospel was preached in this world, all attempts to go back to a pure “pagan joy,” all “renaissances,” all “healthy optimisms” were bound to fail…And it is this sadness that permeates mysteriously the whole life of the world, its frantic and pathetic hunger and thirst for perfection, which kills all joy…

Yet, on the other hand…through the Cross, joy came into the whole world. This joy is pure joy because it does not depend on anything in this world, and is not a reward of anything in us. It is totally and absolutely a gift, the ‘charis,’ the grace. And being pure gift, this joy has a transforming power.
~ Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

sophisticated,
put-together,
altogether reasonable,
lofty,
grand,
popular,
attractive,
restful,
calming,
or even beautiful.

It’s that, in truth, mystery is:

difficult,
shrouding,
plain,
unassuming,
frustrating,
meek,
unavoidable,
yet hidden.

It is the square brown chest behind file boxes in the attic, containing a grandmother’s embroidery and whatever lies beneath it.

It is the tug of time-sense on a street corner, where instead of SUVs there were Model As, there were slow hoof-beats and cart wheels creaking, there was the river in flood and the valley green, verdant under a June sky, there were women carrying clothes to the rocky shore.

It is the smell of sweat in a field, the muscle ache of another shovelful. The sound that wasn’t there last try, the clank and reverberation of something under soil, something foreign, something laid there. It is, “Oh. I didn’t know about this before.”

But, wait. I said I joyfully overdid this weekend. Is this me? The woman of exceeding small energy, who can see coming those times of activity which will be too much, and who bows out graciously, or if she can’t, goes ahead and overdoes, all the while grumbling and griping inside, knowing the difficult recovery time looms?

But I wanted to do the first Saturday breakfast again. When I went last time, in February, energy higher and my weekend not filled, I discovered the wonder of weathered faces. Men and women, whom I sort of helped serve, but who were truly served by the regular crew, who the day before had set long tables, with flowers in vases, tableware wrapped in white napkins. The people filed in, laying down backpacks, removing coarse gloves. They were waited on. They were treated to an egg/cheese/meat dish called Strata. Not super fancy, but sustaining. They were asked if they’d like seconds, and they were waited on again.

I helped that time in the kitchen, keeping sweet potato hash in a pan stirred, while Ella dished fresh plates for eager servers and asked me to taste and see if her previously-cooked concoction (from ingredients bought and some donated) was thawed enough. Amazing flavor, even for me who often passes on sweet potatoes.

This time for the March breakfast, I felt the tailwind of teens who’d shown up to serve, who were at the elbows of our attendees the moment they sat down. I settled in to a patrol of tables, watching for those needing seconds, listening to an experienced woman on the crew ask, “Sir, would you like some juice? Another helping?” I ran for tabasco sauce upon request. Despite my never having waitressed well (fired after one week back at age 19), I kind of caught the drift of how this art is supposed to bloom. I visited briefly with people. I lifted folding chairs.

Sunday I lifted chairs, too, after the lunch we were in charge of after church, and my body complained, but only with accompanying gratefulness, surprising me. I sensed I was headed for recovery days, and therefore I was supposed to be finding fault with reality, blaming anyone close enough to somehow qualify. Yet, as harmonized birds hopped between walnut branches above when I made at last for our car, I didn’t mind shuffling like a 90-year-old.

Probably the 90-year-olds who help with such serving as these breakfasts rarely shuffle at all.

Visions of hot dogs and french fries helped me, at least, and sometimes my children, summon a burst of new energy.

Those mommyhood days captured and deserved every drop of limited energy I possess. They were wonderful, except probably most of all for wondering too much: what people thought; whether I was failing worse than anyone; how I might ever rest; well, you who are reading are possibly someone who knows the list by heart. Or knows how it feels to imagine these things, watching someone else live their mommying phase.

Back then I swam the jelly river of stress pretty regularly. I guess flailed in that river is how to describe it. I tend to blame my chest-wall pains and panics on the demands of Christianity, as I was practicing it then at home and in church. There really was a lot of confusion and despair within my American Bible-based conservative nondenominational scene. But overall I think, looking back now, I was simply in the situation I had chosen and had found myself in. With a lot of other folks. Most of whom tried to make progress, as well, against a sticky current.

(I guess I obviously prefer salty, fast-food entries to sweet spreads on toast.) Anyway, stressed and despairing as I was, I was learning. Preparing. What would come next would be better.

Thankfully, the parenthood phase which I traveled with middle-to-late teens took place in a Christian situation I chose with gladness and rested in profoundly. I still stressed myself out, but I was all the while gulping wonderful insights. Full-course meals, perhaps. I loved hunkering down with my Bible and my books. And my journals and my writing. Going inward, inward. Staying calm. It was intriguing. It was enough. I was, yeah, well a little, a hermit. I was more certain of everything than probably I will have been at any time in my life, when all’s said and done.

Still and once again, I was preparing.

Today I have grownup children around me. None of us consume many condiments, and we each go our own way, yet we process together somewhat often about Christianity. This phase, I expect, will burst the seeds from their pod, a few seconds into my future, and there will be fresh mommy- and daddyhoods happening, and stress, and preparation.

I think now in some sense I am the toddler, the one lagging and surging off toward the pretty butterfly, the one who must pause and consider something wonderful about movement in my own tiny self that others have long been accustomed to. I may never grow accustomed. I don’t imagine I’ll get bored, either. I may joyfully choose the long way though I never catch up.

Someone commented on their smart phone’s capabilities. I responded, “I have a dumb phone.” Which is true. Or maybe it’s my phone that has the dumb one. But, perspective, it’s all a matter of.

Anyway. I don’t text or applicate. What I have done, forever (hm, as I grow longer in years that’s less an exaggeration), is appreciate and be nurtured by books, those texts which are somewhat longer lived. This has become my new thought for the current year, a very old and lovely thought, that still rings in my self like music (and magic): Which book shall I read today?

Here is a taste of my findings, relating to artful stuff, from C.S. Lewis’s wonderful Surprised by Joy:

To compare and to prefer [is] an operation that does little good even when dealing with works of art and endless harm when dealing with nature. Total surrender is the first step toward the fruition of either. Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all. (And notice here how the true training for anything whatever that is good always prefigures and, if submitted to, will always help us in, the true training for the Christian life. That is a school where they can always use your previous work whatever subject it was on.)

A little later in the same volume is a smidge that inspires me with desire to start a whole new blog. (In fact, I did):

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.