Birds of My Past

This came up on one of those "memories from the past" things on Facebook.  I had just scrolled past another post someone shared about an estate sale of a so called hoarder in Michigan.  Funny the powerful connection we can have to things.

I'm by no means a hoarder, our house is a wreck most days but I actually make a conscious effort to keep de-cluttering our house and life. Doesn't seem to be working all that well...but by golly I'm trying. Some stuff you just can't get rid of though. Some things I would give anything to have back. Like this odd glass bird and the family times it resided over.

When I was a little girl, on up through my last teen years, a bird like this hung from the ceiling in the middle of my Great Grandmother's kitchen. I never got the chance to ask where the bird came from and I don't know where it went after her death. I just recall it silently perched there amid some of the happiest of my childhood memories. It swung over Sunday dinners and Christmas Eve supper, back when it seemed that most of my family could be in a room together and still laugh with one another.

It watched my father and uncles shine the old brass bed that Nannie shared with my Great Grandfather who we called Big Daddy. It hung over my shoulder as I sat listening to my Grandpa, Papaw, talk with Nannie about the family business, on the few times I was lucky enough to follow him up the street to her house for the second breakfast he daily had with her after having toast and coffee with his wife, my Granny.

I have dreamt about that bird flying up through the attic door that it was attached to many times. I'm not sure where it was going or why. Perhaps to the other side of some place I can't know about yet but where perhaps many of my family waits with the answers to things like the origin of this odd glass bird.

I guess many of us are odd birds. I know I am.  I'd say I come from a whole flock of them.  They all seem to have flown the coop over the years, some in opposition to each other, some of them perhaps over the rainbow. What I often wouldn't give some days for birds of a feather to flock together and relive some semblance of the past without prejudice or pettiness. I'd relish the opportunity for us to return to birds of peace instead of prey.