What Caregiving Taught Me About Feeding Birds
Lessons from vicious snakes, blind finches, bereavement, and dirty politics
I began feeding the birds for my mother. Housebound by the frailties of age and the attitude that going out was too damn much trouble, she needed a connection to the outside world, I thought.
My earliest memory is of my mother and her mother, wielding garden hoes in an attempt to fend off a snake that was attacking a nest of baby birds. I’d just awakened from a nap and stretched myself taller than the windowsill to watch the drama unfolding outside. “Get him, Ethel!” my grandmother shrieked at her namesake.
“You get him, Ethel,” my mom yelled back, addressing her mother by her given name instead of calling her mom. The two Ethels whacked away, and as I recall, emerged victorious although the senior Ethel’s askew babushka made her look somewhat like a pirate. My mom probably lit herself a cigarette right there in the bushes while cooing over the baby birds before she and her mother went on to whatever task they’d meant to do in the first place.
We lived on the backwater of the Mississippi then in a town known for its lax liquor laws and an easier attitude toward certain recreational pursuits that were frowned upon on in its sister city on the other side of the river. I was too young to know about any of that, but I knew about the birds. Cranes soared over the water and we raced out the back door to watch them. If flocks of geese were winging and quacking overhead, we tilted our faces skyward until they were out of sight. Cardinals and redheaded woodpeckers provided thrilling displays of scarlet against the dark bark of a big tree where my father had nailed a wooden fruit crate. It was my mother and I who kept it stocked with seeds and nuts and bread crusts.
Indoors we kept a green parakeet named Jerry. “Jerry is a dirty bird” was his only attempt at conversation. Or maybe his line was, “Jerry is a pretty bird,” and it was my mother who tried to pressure a confession from him while she cleaned up his messes after a free-flying afternoon. I wonder now about our kitchen hygiene since it was there he was allowed out of his cage, an old bed sheet tacked up in the doorway to the living room to keep him from pooping on the upholstered furniture. But nobody died — except Jerry of course, eventually.
