A small bird

a sparrow

facing West

on glossy paper

brown

perched on a disembodied pine bough

how typical.

it’s only paper, this one.

no matter how much we want it to be a real bird

it’s only ever paper.

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Last Fall, my father had the pine trees in the back yard cut down. They were dead, had died in the drought, and I think: at some point, long ago, two small pine trees were planted, two small pine trees that grew tall and housed sparrows and blue jays and mockingbirds and squirrels, two pine trees that grew so they seemed impossibly tall, two pine trees that shaded and dropped needles that had to be raked because dad says pine needles can’t be mowed over, they’re too acidic and will ruin the cultivated lawn, two pine trees that Bitsy, the chocolate lab, a “hunting dog,” would take a running start at to try to catch squirrels, a running start from across the lawn that propelled her several feet up the trunk of the tree before gravity pulled her back to the ground where she belonged, sans squirrel, two pine trees that would eventually be felled not by dogs or squirrels or birds or terrorists, just by drought and men.

If you had bet those pine trees would last, you would have lost that bet.

We lost that bet and others like it.

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In Chicago, we lived in a house. And for a while, we loved each other, until we became too afraid to love each other. In Chicago, before we became afraid, the lawn came under my care. In Chicago, I mowed, I weeded, I watered. One day, the body of a squirrel appeared, beneath a small tree in the front yard. We weren’t sure what had happened to the squirrel. There wasn’t any obvious trauma. It lay there for days, which turned into weeks. I kept thinking that somebody else would take care of it, that it would magically disappear like the dead cats that appeared on my lawn in Savannah after Spring Break. But nobody ever did. Finally, I took a shovel I found in the garage and put the decaying body in a black plastic trash bag. The smell was terrible.

Later, as I lay in bed, I wondered if I should have buried the squirrel.

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Styling one’s hair so that it looks like a helmet does not, in fact, provide the same protection as an actual helmet. The reality is that it provides absolutely no protection at all.

No protection at all.