(When you touch down with healing in your wings)

     Last summer, for one unusual week, our front yard was visited by magpies.  Do you know what Magpies are?  I'm going to tell you.  They are the bird version of ugly and strange. Magpies are blue, black, and white but they stand with their beaks partly open.  Have you ever seen a bird stand with it's beak partially open?  It doesn't look right.  It's not right.  It is never polite to show up in someone's yard and stand there with your mouth hanging open.  Magpies are rude and inconsiderate.  This is my professional observation.  Until they invaded my yard in groups of 6-10 at at time for one week last summer, I had never seen this type of bird, and had to look them up on the internet to figure out what they were.  Magpies.  For that one week, they invaded my yard.  It was only that one week.

I have not seen even one since.

     But this past year, I have seen many other varieties of birds in this yard. I have never lived in a house whose front yard attracted quite so many birds of so many varieties.  They land on the fence and hop about on the ground.  I watch them silently from the inside of the screen door.   Since the magpies, none of these birds have left me with a feeling of creepiness.  Besides the magpies, none of these birds has hinted to me that it wants to bite my memory and chew on my sanity for awhile.  Instead, the presence of the birds brings me comfort.  

I like to think they are little visitors from God.  That they have arrived at my house after flying around the Throne of God for a while.   That they wanted to stay there, in Heaven, but He sent them down to comfort my heart, and then
on their way to fly to my children, the four who are many miles away, who might just be sitting down to dinner right about the time it takes the birds to land on their doorstep and peck their particular yard worms.

My favorite bird visitor was the red breasted robin who perched on the fence and stayed there a while longer than most.

Probably the most consistent of my bird visitors are the black birds, and they are the largest.

This morning, When I looked out, the first thing I saw was a gray dove.  As soon as I looked at it, it lifted it's wings, then it's body, diagonally to the left in front of me as it flew up.  

-XOXO,