Lessons from Robins

Or finding the courage to tell you what I'm working on

I first see her weaving her nest on our inoperable garage light and think of the sparrows I’ve been evicting from our mailbox for three weeks. 

“You can stay,” I say through our glass door. I watch her rhythm, weave and fly, weave and fly, entranced by the act of her creation. 

I check her progress daily. For a few days, her absence suggests she abandoned this project. But one day, I opened the curtains to the back door and saw her ruffled feathers fluffed over her nest. She stared back at me.

Now, when my husband needs anything from the backyard, he tip-toes like a teenager sneaking in late. I watch him creep along the side of the house and hug the corner as he shuffles against the wall between the house and the garage. He gives the watchful Mama a wide berth as he doubles back to reach the pedestrian door. She doesn’t flinch when he opens the garage door and backs the car out. 

I fashion my stealthy moves like a new mom escaping a napping newborn. One quiet step in her direction, and she flutters away. My boys play outside without any sound precaution, and she continues her perch. I stay content, watching her through the glass door. 

For two weeks, she only leaves for short periods, but mostly she sits and waits. She waits in the middle of the night when I blind her with the spotlight to survey the yard for lurking animals before I let the dog out. She waits when the rain pours down in front of her, feathers damp but mostly dry, protected by the overhang. She waits in anticipation for something to happen. 

We have that in common. 

I wait. I wait for the email that reads, congratulations instead of unfortunately. I wait for the response that says I’d love to talk more about this project. I wait for someone with the power to print or pay to tell me I’m a writer— like I waited for Humble Design to carve my name in a name tag with the title Designer. Affirmation that I became one of the two things I always wanted to be.

The required weeks achieved; I see the robin’s time spent in reverse. She no longer sits and waits, leaving for short periods, but beats a new rhythm as she flies and gathers, returning briefly. 

  “I think the eggs hatched,” I tell my husband.

The next day, he confirms it when he hovers the camera over the nest to snap the picture on his lunch break. He sends it to me—fragile, pink bodies snuggled in the bottom of the bowl. Hints of gray feathers cling to them like the faintest coating of dryer lint. Impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

photo credit Craig Sykes

A few days later, we witness three tiny beaks waiting open when she flutters in from her gathering. They are silent, not squawking like the starlings who nest in our chimney. Those birds seem to argue over each mouthful until the parent leaves to gather more. 

These chicks remind me of a baby bird we found in the driveway where I nannied. The little girl wanted to rescue him right away, but I hesitated. We left him alone in hopes his mama would return.

When we went outside to greet the girl’s mom, he lay where we left him, and Operation Rescue went into action. We scooped him up, and her mom made a nest of paper towels in a Tupperware. 

She didn’t expect him to live through the night.  But a surprise came in the morning when the girl and the bird came to be tended. We fed him pieces of worms with tweezers, and he gobbled down each morsel. He came back the next day and the next, and we watched him transform from scrawny pink with gray hints of feathers to gray speckled with straw as the shafts of his wings grew in. The red-orange belly indicated what we may have known all along. He soon started to flap his wings building the muscles he needed to fly.

I watch our backyard baby birds practice the same.

***

I’ve tested these writing muscles for over a year. The evening I realized they still existed, I painted a verse onto fabric while watching Little Women.

“We are God’s Masterpiece created new in Jesus to join him in creating the good things He planned for us long ago.” Ephesians 2:10.

I watched Winona Ryder as Jo March with her nightcap writing by candlelight. The scene that propelled me to write poetry and stories in high school. The picture that made me want to be a writer.

Why not write?  The thought shocked me.  

Because I wasn’t good at it, I countered.

I remembered all the critiques from the peer evaluations in college.

“I’m unsure if this communicates what you’re trying to say.”

And the professor’s comment, “This resolves a little too easily at the end.”

My children’s writing teacher, the class I wanted to succeed in, “I can’t accept this story. Please rewrite it.” 

Maybe that wasn’t the kind of writing you were supposed to do, the conversation in my head continued. Don’t you have words and thoughts that keep piling up in your mind that want to be woven together and at least written down? I’m shocked again to find tears in my eyes at the truth. 

But the only thing I’ve done with my Creative Writing degree is work in Interior Design. Wasn’t that all a mistake? How can I know it will be accepted this time?

You don’t, came the reply. And then the words from Lucy and Aslan in Prince Caspian came to mind. The ones that replay any time I want to know what will happen before I take the steps to do it.

“You mean,” said Lucy rather faintly, “that it would have turned out all right— somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?”

“To know what would have happened, child?” said Aslan. “No. Nobody is ever told that.”

“Oh, dear,” said Lucy. 

“But anyone can find out what will happen,” said Aslan. “If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me—what will happen? There is only one way of finding out.” ¹

***

We named the rescued robin, Lucky Tweets. He grew enough to flex his feathers and fly from one end of the kitchen to the other. We eventually gave him a cage outside with an open door. He hopped around the yard and paused in the grass to listen before he darted to grab worms for himself.  When one of us came outside, he landed on an arm, or shoulder, or head. He hopped into his cage to go inside at night and start the rhythm over the next day. Until one evening, he never returned. 

***

After the Jo March, Lucy, and Aslan incident, I started to write. I wrote to process family events on the notes app on my phone. I thought about writing a Bible study or children’s books. I started by submitting a few short pieces, not letting anyone read them beforehand. All the responses started with, unfortunately. 

See? I said to the voice in my head, told you I wasn’t any good. 

But then, I saw a flyer in the library window. “Journaling group every 4th Wednesday.”

I walked in the door and signed up.

“I would like to make this more of a writing group,” the leader said in the first meeting, “we can read something we’re working on and get encouraging feedback.”

See, that voice countered. Keep going and find out.

***

“We’re looking to do a church-wide small group in the fall,” my pastor said, “we would need someone to write that.”

He had come over for dinner with a few other friends to discuss hosting small groups. 

“I would be interested in writing that,” I heard myself say. Internally, I looked at myself flabbergasted. 

Anyone can know what can happen…

***

“I write too,” she approached me after I led the curriculum meeting for the church-wide study. “We should get coffee and talk.”

At coffee, we excitedly twittered our stories to each other. Mine sat in my head like a pile of dried grass, but as I laid them out for her blade by blade, I wondered... 

“That could be a book,” she answered my thought. 

“Ha, right,” I scrambled the blades into a pile again. We committed to meeting regularly to share writing.  

Her words wouldn’t leave me alone. I considered the jumbled pile of stories in my head. I opened a document that started to weave those stories together. 

I can’t write a book, can I?

There is only one way to find out.

***

I watch Mama Robin swoop after a squirrel that lurks on the roof of our garage. She chases him into the neighbor’s backyard. She dives again with another robin, and the squirrel bounces into our yard, approaching the garage. As he hops through the grass, the robins herd him down the driveway to protect the nest. 

***

“I hope someday I can write like you,” my new writing friend told me during our meeting. She looked like she meant it.

On a different day in my library writing group, another member said, “That’s really good; just tweak it a bit at that one part.”

I feel the words like the protection of Mama Robin swooping at the negativity lurking in the corners of my mind. I continue to weave my story like a nest to house the book that started as an idea. The hatched idea might grow into a book and fly to join a flock of other books.  I think Lucky Tweets found his flock and became the wild robin he always was. Or maybe the book will only be read by my writing friends. Mama Robin only built her nest for her and her babies. She is a bird, after all.  I’m writing a book, and published or not, I’m a writer. I am writing, after all. Where will this go? There is only one way to find out.

1. Lewis, Prince Caspian, 137