ok, kids, you've been hanging around for long enough so I have some personal writing to share with you. ("Personal" as in "I wrote it my very own self." )
There are a couple of pieces in this bit, and I'll put them up one at a time.
Feel free to comment.
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Sparrow
1.
One day, about an hour before lunch, someone found the little bird. It was a sparrow, not quite ready to fly away on its own. It was just in the floor, someone said, I almost ran over it.
We work in a factory: it is big, and noisy, with huge bay doors that trailers can back right up to. So it is no real wonder that we have a couple of birds in the building all the time. But we only see the adults, though we know there must be nests with chicks somewhere. But as with most urban wildlife, the resident sparrows go largely unnoticed.
At least, until that day. News of the foundling spread through the plant; by the time lunches were all done the bird had a box, a dish of water, a dish of assorted crumbs, and a makeshift nest. It seemed as though half of the plant had been by to see it, in its box on the table in the break area. For the next few hours, there was always at least one person looking in the box every few minutes. Then the supervisors declared "that is enough, now, really." And for almost an hour, the box went untouched.
And then it was break.
A small croud gathered in the break area, and heads shook, and smiles faded. The bird had died.
It was widely speculated and accepted that the bird had fallen from a nest built high, perhaps even in the rafters, that it had mortally wounded itself somehow in its trip from home to us. Such a fall would surely have caused more than survivable damage to the tiny creature.
The tone of the day changed, for certain, after news of its demise spread. People were more sedate. Heads wagged, tounges clucked, poor little thing became the phrase of the day.
I think that the majority of the workforce was much more gentle in spirit after that, more melancholy; as if we all realized, unanimously, that something wonderful had left our world.
