Fear of Flying

The front porch, with its view of the garden, is my special place, where I can watch the things I’ve planted and nurtured thrive.  Curled up on my porch swing, I watch the sunflowers stretch past the yard’s trellis entrance, marvel that the Spring-blooming delphiniums are still putting out new flowers, and wait for the Asiatic lilies to finally show their colors.  Here, I also watch my children leave and return, climbing onto the school bus, biking to the end of the block or, in the case of the older ones, driving themselves away.

It was here one day a month or so ago that I first saw the bird fly into one of my hanging baskets with bits of twig and Spanish moss in her beak, again and again.  Thrilled she was building a nest so close to our own habitation, I searched the shelves for my Audubon bird identification book, and finally settled on the classification of Carolina wren.  The little brown bird with the white stripes on the side of her face returned relentlessly to weave a home with a circular entrance in middle of my ferns.

Human presence didn’t seem to faze the little bird although once she made a hasty exit when I watered the basket while she was still in it.  That time, I peered into the nest to see two eggs, white with brown speckles.  The next day, I inspected to find two more, and carefully shared the view with my children.

Over the next few weeks, the mother bird became a regular visitor, and her mate also appeared.  One time, he raised a fearsome squawk from a nearby bench to run off the neighbor’s cat, which had settled in to take a nap on the chair beneath the basket nest.

Then, the birds began visiting with insects in their beaks.  After such a visit, I looked inside to see the hungry, open mouths of three tiny, fragile-looking wren babies.

As the temperature climbed into the 90s, I carefully cooled down the nest and kept its plants alive each evening by watering the basket from opposite the nest entrance.  One recent night, as I turned the hose on the basket, three tiny brown birds with stubby wings flew out in a panic, ending their short flights with three awkward landings on the lawn.  I sent out my 7-year-old to keep an eye on them until I could scoop them up and return them to their hanging plant home, where they sat looking out among the fern braches.

Earlier this same day, in ironic, parallel fashion, a policewoman called to say my 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, who had been driving solo for only about a week, landed the car in a ditch while trying to perform a three-point turn.  Though she and the car were both ok, the experience heightened the sense of vulnerability I felt every time I watched her leave.

I sat on my porch swing for awhile, worried the little birds would try to leave again.  Then I saw the mother and father bird return and figured it was safe to leave the babies in their own parents’ care while I went inside to put dinner on the table.

After dinner, I stepped out onto the front porch and froze to see a small brown, tufted shape on the slab.  Sadly inspecting the unmoving form, I saw feathers missing from its neck.  Had the neighbor’s cat gotten to it and shaken its neck broken as it tried to recover from another trial flight?

Over in the trees on the side of the garden, I heard the tweets of multiple birds and went over to see the parent birds and two babies flit from branch to branch.  Did they know one baby was missing?  Did they witness the tragedy?  Out of four eggs, two babies would carry on the wren community – was that a successful outcome by wren standards?

I think about the article my husband emailed to me about summer being the deadliest time of year for teen crashes.  Tomorrow, my daughter will take out the car again to drive herself to her summer job.  I know keeping her indefinitely in the nest is not a possibility.  She will insist on flying, as she should.  But like the baby birds, she doesn’t sense her own vulnerability.

In the novel “Animal Dreams” by Barbara Kingsolver, a father who nearly lost his young daughters in a flash flood darkly muses that it doesn’t make sense for a mortal man to love anything this much.  And yet we do.