Lori Miller Kase: GUARDING THE NEST • Cleaver Magazine

Lori Miller Kase
GUARDING THE NEST

The robin eyes us from her nest. All it takes is a ruffling of the papers beside me to send her flying into the nearby redbud trees, angry wings flapping. I sit on the back porch, computer perched on my lap, typing quietly, trying not to move. Willing my dog, who is lying against me, to remain still. It is my porch, yet I am the intruder. The robin is guarding her nest.

My own nest is empty. So I prefer to be out here, where I can see the tiny ballerina-pink blossoms making their brief appearance on the redbud branches, where I can witness the slow climb of the not-yet-flowering rose bushes along the arbor beside my porch, where I can watch as each new bloom emerges in the garden beyond the arbor. It’s May, so the bleeding hearts arch over delicate blue clouds of forget-me-nots, the speckled clumps of lungwort leaves are crowned with tiny lavender florets, and multi-colored tulips rise from what will later become bountiful herb and vegetable beds. I remain on the porch, working and watching, as the robin returns, perches on the nest, then swoops away, wings beating against her body, against the air, again and again. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, in reproach.

We didn’t have this porch when my children were babies. There was no roof to offer shelter to nesting birds, no column capital on which a robin could set up home and incubate its young. Instead there was a deck, exposed to the elements, where my babies, in their floppy sunhats, sat at a miniature picnic table and dipped skinny paintbrushes into trays of water and color; where they played in a portable sandbox, creating castles and moats and tea party cakes. We sometimes saw foxes out back, so I stayed close, ever-vigilant. Guarding the nest.

There weren’t as many flowers back then. Instead, I watered and fed my babies, made sure they were exposed to sunlight. I nurtured them, and watched them blossom.

The robin appears more and more frequently, darting from tree to nest to tree. I can’t see into the nest, but imagine several blue-green ellipses, the color of a pale sky, or of my porch ceiling. I leave them be: I don’t want the robin to abandon her babies. Still, I wonder how much longer before the eggs hatch, before the babies grow strong enough to leave the nest and fly into the garden. Before we can remove her nest and I can reclaim my porch. I am annoyed by the robin, but I understand her.

Lori Miller Kase is a journalist, fiction-writer and essayist based in Simsbury, Connecticut. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among other publications. She has received several Excellence in Journalism awards from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists, and The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction. She studied creative writing at Wesleyan University, where she received her master’s degree. Her recently-completed novel, The Accident, was the young adult finalist for the Tassy Walden Awards for New Voices in Children Literature. She’s also working on a collection of linked short stories.