The river
and the children we once were
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
We are all still the children we once were. It is inescapable. When I was little, I had a rabbit; Snuffles. He was snow white with black speckling down the centre of his back. One morning I went to his hutch with fresh greens, and he was laying dead, as stiff as a board. I knew, by then, what Death was. I recognised its permanence and felt the weight of its presence. I sensed the shift in the intensity of the moment. The quietening. The delicate, almost balletic, way with which everything was suddenly handled.
My aunt lined a shoebox with hay, and I gently (so gently) placed his rigid body inside. We would bury him that afternoon, making a little headstone and planting a rose so that his grave could be just like my mothers.