playing with universes

Hardly ever do I feel I have picked wrong- chosen the wrong life.  Obviously it is not as easy as choosing candy from a vending machine after all you build your life perhaps not like legos but more like playmobile gathering people and sets until your world is what you have put in to it.

Sometimes I forget my life is not supposed to look like the life of others.  Sometimes others forget too.  There are times though when the placements of things give me undeniable proof of goodness.  Right now that is the placement of a set of tiny animals: 4 baby quails, one smaller than the others.

Little Things.

When Beach was picking her 4 quail I warned the cute girl helping us Beach would want specific ones.  The girl gladly and patiently fished through scampering miniature birds at Beach’s order while I held Beach up to see in the cage.  At one point in the capture Beach second guessed her decision of rounding up the smallest, “Maybe I shouldn’t be getting the smallest....”  It was fleeting and we moved her away from at least the injured.  I had had the same thought, little on a farm isn’t good but the girl helping us said, “Little means strong.”  I looked at little Beach and the smallness of the girl helping us and the button quail and accepted it all.

Farm Experience Takes Over.

When I was running with the Surgeons on Trauma Service I learned to speak small it said more in a shorter period of time. Don't explain the whole condition, name it and proclaim it. It is either a good thing or a bad thing; in matters of life and death only hypothermia is ambiguous.  The dead will not be impressed with the length of your knowledge.  The reason for 4.  “I wanted three but Dad said I should get four since one will die.”

The Trouble with Peep.

At home in the cage they behave according to book of farms.  The largest, the strongest and the smallest worrisome.  Peep will tumble over and not be able to get up.  Peep will fall into a sudden sick looking sleep.  Peep often looks like she is on the edge of dying.  Peep appears to faint when scared.

The Heart of a Mother.

Laying on her bedroom floor peering in the cage I hear the words many mother’s have winced, “I wish they would grow-up so they will not be so delicate.”  As an older mother I know how upside down that is.  I thought of the perils of a big world of driving, of love, of road trips in old cars, of the navy...  I thought about the unplanned future of her birds: we have no plan for them.  They are futureless.  And they will never outgrow their delicateness.  No one does.

Playing God

Beach was put to bed sobbing over Peep.  And at 5:30 am I crept into her room to find all four birds alive and moving about.  Peep had made it through the night.  It is hard to wrap my head around what my heart knows.  In our less than perfect messy sometimes hard life Beach is getting lessons about compassion, caring, fear, living, death, fragility, determination, work… lessons that I believe if every child had, our world would be a better place.        

Which Came First

I had joked they were so tiny she should name them after galaxies.  But there is something to that.  She chose the little lives she wanted to cultivate reaching into their steel cage world like a god.  And she peers down on them like one too offering food, water, and shelter.  She scoops them up at will moves them about.  Their tiny bird souls own her love which is called responsibility.  And when your child is crying on your shoulder tears soaking through your shirt because she understands things so big they could save the world you know you picked right. 

When I turn this one loose in society like button quail running daintily down the rows of lettuce the world will smile as she goes by.      

 

All four in her hand