Winter Birds Read Online Free PDF

not have meant to break her heart, but intention is irrelevant. Once a heart is broken, the words “I didn’t mean to” afford little relief.
    A woman’s heart may also be broken by the absence of a man. I have known women, many of them buried now, whose lives were spent in quest of a man— spent in the sense of used up, depleted of emotional resources. Some of these women never found one man, yet some found too many, for “the absence of a man” does not mean the absence of a physical presence.
    When speaking of children, however, absence is more literal. The physical presence of a child engages a woman’s whole mind and heart, defines not only the perimeter of her life but occupies the total square footage. A child, though imperfect in any number of ways, can light up a woman’s life. This I have observed. I have not experienced it firsthand. I speak now of a child of one’s own, not merely a child placed in one’s care for a time, for such children may delight a woman’s heart only temporarily. At some point she must always give them back to their mothers.
    I recall a child in the first class of third graders I taught. I was twenty-one years old, and she was eight. I remember only her first name—Starr. Her eyes were like polished onyx, and she could run faster than all the boys in the class. Starr’s face is the picture I always carried with me of the daughter I might someday have. I carry it still, since I never had a daughter to take its place.
    By simple arithmetic I know that Starr would be a woman of sixty-seven now. She might have arthritis, the beginnings of osteoporosis. Her black eyes could be clouded with glaucoma. In my picture, however, she remains a child.
    It is after school, and Starr has just drawn a square on the chalkboard, very neatly, using a yardstick for the sides. I am at my desk only a few feet from her, correcting spelling papers. “Look, Miss Langham,” she says, and I do. I look at the square first and then at her face. “If I got in there,” she says, placing her finger in the center of the square, “and pushed hard against the sides—” she stops to lift her arms and flatten her hands as if trying to move a wall—“I could bend the square into a circle.”
    I believe a child does this for a woman, changes the contours of her life, reshapes the square of each day into a circle, then expands it by another dimension into a sphere. The sphere is punctured when a woman loses a child. I think about Rachel and myself, inhabiting the same living space. We are a sad pair, a deflated balloon and a flat empty square.
    I hear Rachel moving about in the kitchen on the other side of my door. I hear thumps, as if she is setting down heavy bags on the countertop. A bird alights at the feeder outside my window. I have seen his type before and have searched him out in my bird book, which identifies over thirty species of sparrows. This one, the chipping sparrow, has a chestnut crown and a white stripe above each eye. Described in my book as “pesky and tireless,” it is also called the hairbird because of its obsession with hair, which it supposedly favors for the lining of its nest, horsehair being its first choice but other donors also accepted—dogs, raccoons, deer, even humans.
    I imagine this bird darting about, making diving raids to nip strands of hairs from the tails of grazing horses or lazy dogs. I imagine hatless men feeling a sudden pinch and reaching up to rub their heads. I watch now as the chipping sparrow pecks seeds out of the feeder, then flutters down to eat them off the ground. He hops about briefly, then is off, a streak of brown and gray disappearing into the treetops.
    I think of a bird’s life, so much of it spent in the air, its nest only a place to lay and incubate its eggs, to house its fledglings until it can push them out. I think of the miles traveled by some birds in migration—a continual cycle of leaving their homes when the days grow cool, then