Nest

In the back yard, early this morning, I watched a little bird come and go perhaps 20 times. It was a little brown bird with a white head and it was collecting grasses for a nest. It would alight in the yard, hop about looking for a choice blade, pluck and the blade and then fly off over the roof of the house just behind the yard in the direction of a tall tree with grand yellow flowers. Twenty seconds later, the bird would come gliding back again to choose another bit of grass from the yard. As I've said, it was a small bird, no larger than, say, a tangerine, and so it took but small bits of grass on each trip. And I thought to myself, whichever infants this bird is making this nest for will surely be full grown adults by the time the thing is finished! And that's if the nest builder itself doesn't die first from exhaustion. But then it occurred to me that perhaps there are dozens of little brown birds in dozens of yards, each carrying back its building materials to the same tree. It must be so.