The New Family Moving In Next Door
We take the magic we are offered, wherever we can find it. It helps if you sprinkle a few magic seeds, yourself, but you may have to wait a while for them to sprout.
If you bake, if you make jam or write poems that actually turn out sometimes, you know, or at least mostly know how it feels to build a birdhouse that a young family of birds choose as the sanctuary where they will set down some roots, create a nursery, lay a clutch of tiny eggs and then sit atop them, warming them so that they can grow and develop, and eventually hatch into tiny, little bird beings.
The original version of this birdhouse served as nursery and home to maybe a couple of dozen young families before it timed out, before the boards began to rot and grow ‘punky’ to the point that they wouldn’t nest in it any more and I needed to take it down and build another in its likeness.
With the first one, I had a family moving in within a week of putting it up. It doesn’t always work that way.
It’s been more than a year since I placed this new and improved, “Mini-Me” bird house, Version 2 atop the climbing rose tower. Last spring I saw one or two casual lookers but no takers. One never really knows what they’ll like and not like enough to cast their lot with a bird house and move in.
And when they don’t take to it right away there is that tiny, little, sometimes accusatory voice that whispers in your ear, questioning all the things you might have done better, done differently, done wrong. It’s only human to want to read the reply to our love letters mere moments after we’ve sent them. When we don’t get any response, we fidget, we begin to question ourselves… possibly even speak poorly of ourselves.
We hold to our hope …learn to wait.
Sometimes our answers come slowly. And sometimes, even tardy as they are, they are exactly what we were hoping for when we began building our love letter, all those months, even years before. Love plays the long game.
“ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.” 1 Corinthians 13:4
With any luck we’ll have baby chickadees by the time the roses are blooming.
“Love plays the long game”
So worth remembering.🌱🙏🏼
Love it🧚