“A bird in the house means a death in the house” – A Bird in the House, Margaret Laurence
While not superstitious to any significant extent, this portent from Margaret Laurence’s story has haunted me ever since I encountered it in high school. The quote comes from the short story “A Bird in the House”, within the same-titled novel of eight short stories. A sparrow trapped in the main character Vanessa’s bedroom foreshadowed the death of her father.
Enounters with birds in unfortunate circumstances have always deeply upset me, from the time I found a lifeless robin amongst our garden of corn as a child.
This spring I heard a loud chirping off and on over a few minutes. It sounded as if it was coming from the attached garage, but the sparrows were unusually loud in the front, so I wasn’t entirely clear from whence the song came. I opened the garage door with dread. All was quiet. I heard birds chirping outside. It was all quiet in the garage, and so I closed it, feeling relieved.
The next day I was backing out with the Lake Louise-green Toyota Corolla Dad had so lovingly passed on to me, when I hit the brake abruptly on the driveway. In front where I had just pulled out, a tiny lifeless body lay on the cold, grey garage floor.
I knew what it was before I climbed out to more closely inspect. My heart in my throat I found it laying peaceful, under my car. I feared for its final moments, and I wept.
Jason helped me lovingly wrap the tiny body in some white fabric of my late Grandma’s (Mom’s side) and I placed it in a tiny box, sealing and writing on the outside. And then I sobbed some more.
A few weeks later, my parents had a very upsetting event. They’d gone a bit incommunicado for a bit and I knew something was wrong. When Mom finally wrote, very upset she shared a picture of what she’d found in the pink scaevola, right beside the door to the house on the patio. My heart was in my throat.
A sparrow had found its final refuge in Mom and Dad’s beautiful flowers, looking so peaceful, as if asleep. The deep feeling of horror and dread was reignited, and many more tears of utter sorrow for the tiny sweet bird were shed.
A few weeks later, when our garage door was about to be repaired, I opened the door, awaiting his imminent arrival. The wind was blowing from north to south, and I noticed some small light objects blowing in the open door. Poplar fluffs or some other seed from a blossoming tree, perhaps? Closer investigation proved to be a couple of sparrow feathers. I swept them out, thinking at the time that was the end of that. And yet more and more feathers kept blowing in, I kept sweeping, the service man arrived, I kept sweeping, quicker and more desperately at this point.Frantically sweeping, and realizing now that a murder had taken place nearby. I grabbed paper towel, picking them up as they continued to blow in, and kept sweeping.
My stomach sick, I kept sweeping. I could barely focus on the conversation with the garage man, who seemed unperturbed when I explained what I was doing.
I so desperately – unsuccessfully – tried to keep out the the feathers from my home. They were likely all that remained of a poor sparrow. An innocent sparrow who had met its untimely end via a horrific and unfortunate violent act. I kept sweeping, utterly traumatized. Tears were shed. Picture below was taken that day. Likely it is a feather that sits in the foreground by the scattered shoes. There were too many to keep out of my home.
A few weeks later, Dad was admitted to the hospital under the watchful eye of the Grey Nuns Hospital raven. The massive, craggy beast would shrieked its hoarse cry from the roof at me, and all other patients and visitors.
Despite the uneasy feelings that had been building for months, the constantly pushing back of terror and fear, and the multiple portents (this post focuses on birds; a future one will encompass the truly Shakespearean-styled nature-is-out-of-harmony apocalpytic crescendo of events we experienced), we all pushed on. What else can one do?
During her last few years on this earth, my late Grandma (Dad’s Mom) would quote Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. I had deeply internalized this poem and it served well during these final weeks. Until the last moments, we fought, and Dad fought. We raged, oh friends how we raged against the dying of the light. Ultimately all of us were in fate’s hands alone.