Caption: These are not the birds referenced in the post and this is not my back yard. I didn’t get a photo of that moment so substituting other magical bird moments instead.
The wind today was relentless. We were in a “High Wind Warning” from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m., with gusts over fifty miles an hour. This afternoon, thunderstorms moved through (though ultimately didn’t amount to much.) The howling wind and rain, combined with the fact that it was a lazy Saturday, meant the kids spent the majority of the day inside.
After dinner, the nine year old–perhaps in an attempt to extend bedtime a few minutes later or perhaps fueled by true feelings of stir craziness or even perhaps called by the clearing sky and clean light that follows a rain–asked to go outside. It was already well past bath time, but I had no counter for her argument that “we all need a bit of fresh air everyday and that the wind was doing nothing but bringing in more fresh air for us to enjoy.”
When she had been on the trampoline for a few minutes, jumping away her pent up energy, I went out into the back yard to let the dogs out and to warn her she only had a few minutes left.
“Watch me,” she insisted. “I’m practicing my powers to control the wind.”
I obediently watched as she made a sweeping motion with her arms.
Upon completion of her gesture, the sky above our house filled with birds. A flock of starlings streamed across the sky. Every time I thought surely that was the end of their stream more came. They poured into our dome of vision until they had filled the branches of three huge separate Maple trees behind our house.
I stepped out from under the porch to get a better view of the sky, marveling at how many there were. Certainly over a hundred. Beyond that I can’t begin to guess.
She looked at me triumphantly, and then spread her arms wide and let herself fall backward onto the trampoline like someone falling back into a pool of clear water, fully surrendering, fully expecting to be cradled and held by the wind she stirred with her own hands. She lay there looking up at the enormous sunset sky rimmed by trees that filled with birds on her command.
I realized as I watched her that she didn’t just believe in the magic of what we had just witnessed. She believed she was a part of it. She believed so seamlessly, so purely, that it made me believe, too.
But then again, I’ve always known she was.