We will never meet the owners of the VRBO we are staying at, but I think I like them, because of the birds. They are throughout the apartment. On plants. On the walls. A feather above the nightstand. Even a book beside, “Better living through birding.” 
Maybe it’s because I, too, love birds. To hear them sing on my walks. To paint them. Again and again to be feathered with a stroke of a brush. To give them a bit of my own song, my own words, knowing that no one can share it with a more widespread and gentle touch as they do. 

Perhaps it’s even, “whatever you did for one of the least of these….”

I am at fault as anyone. As guilty as anyone. I can lose my patience. Become ungentle. And I don’t like it. So I paint them birds to tell you that I know better. That I can do better. And if you can see the love in that, in all those flutters, then, then I think, as I pull my shy and daring head from beneath my wing, I think we will soar.

I open the book beside me. There is a quote on the first page, and reading it, I know that I, we, were meant to be here. It reads — “I believe the best way to begin reconnecting humanity’s heart, mind, and soul to nature is for us to share our individual stories” — J. Drew Lanham, from The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.

I sit at the kitchen table of these birding people. I do like them. I, we, are nesting.