Mothers in Nature

What happens when you don't take your Christmas wreaths down fast enough? 

We found out a couple of Christmases ago! And I wrote about the experience below.

Yes, we left those Christmas wreaths up a little too long, but sometimes procrastination pays off.

See, I didn’t want to take the wreaths down right after Christmas, because they still looked so alive with all that evergreen PNW beauty. I also wondered if someone might want to recycle the frames. I bought the wreaths from our school’s parent booster club … but I never found out, and so the wreaths lived on. Until they didn’t.

They started to get a little brown. I walked in the door every day thinking, I’ve got to take those down. Then one day, I came home and my amazing husband had removed exactly one wreath. Of course, I wondered why he didn’t just finish the job.

That brings us to the beautiful, amazing part of the story.

My ever-observant husband realized that a tiny mama bird had taken up residence in our wreath. Her meticulous work in creating a home for her babies and the eggs themselves might have been destroyed without his careful eyes (this is the same guy who once suddenly stopped the car, jumped out, and then got back in the car with a twenty-dollar bill in his hand--careful eyes!).

I am filled with awe just contemplating how this mother-in-nature gave birth to her babies on our front door. (I’m not sure she realized how busy of a place that would be, but the job is done.) Now she waits for her little ones to arrive.

We are careful not to slam the doors or bother her too much. When I walk outside, she flies out of the nest and tut-tuts around the front yard. I can hear the stress in the little clicking noise she makes as she flits around the yard, never far away.

Despite all the noise in the world, and indeed in our in-and-out lives, mama bird is doing her thing. I am grateful that she is. What would our world be like without the fierce determination of mothers like my little bird?

As Mother’s Day approaches, I feel blessed to have this reminder of the grit and force of love that is motherhood. The mothers in my life — my mom, my mother-in-law, my daughter, and my sisters — have all drawn on that gift of strength for different reasons.

Mama bird, we salute you.

Please share this with a mother in your life.