Posted by alexawolf on Wed, 11/26/2008 - 18:31
I just posted an excerpt from my birdie memoir as an article but it occurs to me that anyone who is interested might want to read the beginning of it. Just as background, when my budgie died two years ago, I started writing him a letter. Then letters. Next year I hope to finish the whole memoir. In any case, this was the first letter.)
My Little Bird,
I sit on a cushion on the steps outside my new apartment. Leaning against a second cushion I’ve brought out, I imagine how companionable we’d have been, you and I. Here is where I pictured us together, you, sweet parakeet, in your cage, set upon the step above mine, both of us ignoring the decrepitude of this complex, a twin set of nine units each, their exterior paint faded, dirty, cracked and flaking; and between the two rows of the two-story complex, the courtyard before me.
I gaze at the courtyard. The old palm trees rise up, half their fronds green and upright, and half, a dead yellow, dry as a torch. Near the roofs of the buildings, the dead fronds droop from their heights in long, thick batches like witches’ hair. There are also a thin tree with bark so straggly it looks like an old man’s beard; a much wider tree covered by ivy top to bottom (a neighbor tells me a rat dropped onto her balcony one night from the ivy of that tree); and a tree with many low twisted limbs and a few truncated limbs on higher, thicker branches that hang like huge scrotums. I would have laughed and pointed this out to you, along with the squirrels chasing each other over the flattened, intermittently dry grass: The owner, a slumlord, unwilling to pay for a professional, is the only gardener.
But, still, a courtyard! This would have been so nice for you. Sometimes a bird chirps overhead. You would have looked up, your thinly black-striped, green-feathered body alert, your head with its yellow-feathered crown lifted, your eager wild spirit aroused by the sound, and answered with your own keen chirp.
But you are not here. You are in the ground, in a vintage, varnished Chinese box upon which a pretty bird is hand-painted, with one of your dishes and as many of your favorite toys as I could fit in with you. You are buried behind the kitchen of the apartment I have left, and where you spent most of your life, the six years we lived there. I buried you the day before I moved. It took me an hour to dig with the trowel less than a foot through the hard, packed dirt and tough plant roots. I hope your box is deep enough. I worry it is not. I worry that I made another mistake, leaving you there.
(To read more please go to alexawolfonline.com, scroll down to My Little Bird, and when the subpage - Excerpt #1 - comes up, click on that. Thank you! I look forward to hearing from other birdie folk.)
My Little Bird,
I sit on a cushion on the steps outside my new apartment. Leaning against a second cushion I’ve brought out, I imagine how companionable we’d have been, you and I. Here is where I pictured us together, you, sweet parakeet, in your cage, set upon the step above mine, both of us ignoring the decrepitude of this complex, a twin set of nine units each, their exterior paint faded, dirty, cracked and flaking; and between the two rows of the two-story complex, the courtyard before me.
I gaze at the courtyard. The old palm trees rise up, half their fronds green and upright, and half, a dead yellow, dry as a torch. Near the roofs of the buildings, the dead fronds droop from their heights in long, thick batches like witches’ hair. There are also a thin tree with bark so straggly it looks like an old man’s beard; a much wider tree covered by ivy top to bottom (a neighbor tells me a rat dropped onto her balcony one night from the ivy of that tree); and a tree with many low twisted limbs and a few truncated limbs on higher, thicker branches that hang like huge scrotums. I would have laughed and pointed this out to you, along with the squirrels chasing each other over the flattened, intermittently dry grass: The owner, a slumlord, unwilling to pay for a professional, is the only gardener.
But, still, a courtyard! This would have been so nice for you. Sometimes a bird chirps overhead. You would have looked up, your thinly black-striped, green-feathered body alert, your head with its yellow-feathered crown lifted, your eager wild spirit aroused by the sound, and answered with your own keen chirp.
But you are not here. You are in the ground, in a vintage, varnished Chinese box upon which a pretty bird is hand-painted, with one of your dishes and as many of your favorite toys as I could fit in with you. You are buried behind the kitchen of the apartment I have left, and where you spent most of your life, the six years we lived there. I buried you the day before I moved. It took me an hour to dig with the trowel less than a foot through the hard, packed dirt and tough plant roots. I hope your box is deep enough. I worry it is not. I worry that I made another mistake, leaving you there.
(To read more please go to alexawolfonline.com, scroll down to My Little Bird, and when the subpage - Excerpt #1 - comes up, click on that. Thank you! I look forward to hearing from other birdie folk.)