Lifecycle / Death And Mourning / Unveiling Readings / Birdhouse

Birdhouse

Share it
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Do you have a twenty-foot extension ladder? Good. Let’s get it out of the garage. I want to put this birdhouse up on one of the evergreens that stands off your back deck. I’m going to use long tenpenny nails to fasten it to the tree and some kind of wire strapping, too. I want it to stay there for a long time. I want you to notice it season after season – how the mother bird keeps flying in and out of the little knothole that I drilled to where the baby birds stretch their mouths wide open in a ferocious pink bouquet.

If I am no longer here for some reason, I think you will still see me occasionally reflected in the incessant activity of the birds flying in and out of the birdhouse – always coming and going just like I did, not wishing to become too well-known, or to ever stay long in one place. And yet the birdhouse will say something different about me: it will say that I lived here. It will be a thing that I made with my hands on a specific afternoon, working for hours in my garage, with paint streaks and sawdust on my clothes, and that I took the trouble to hang that little domicile high on the trunk of your particular tree with a knowledge of how life always moves on and yet leaves something behind as well with something alive inside it.

You might say that memory itself is a piece of real estate, a residence with a private entrance and a mystery inside like this small chateau painted blue with orange spots on it, hung twenty feet high – a thing, for a while, out of reach of the predator, time.
-Tony Hoagland

Sign up for eternal bliss and inner peace. (JK, but we will send you fabulous emails once in awhile.)

Woohoo, thanks for signing up!

Stay tuned for occasional emails about all things Jewish.

Your saved faves, all in one convenient place!

Why make an account and save your favorite JewBelong stuff? Because someday Jack is going to get off his ass and pop the question and you’re going to get to plan that wedding you've been thinking about since third grade.

sign up

or

log in

Every time someone signs up for our emails a Jewish angel gets its wings! Subscribe here.

Congratulations! You're in.

Hey, can you watch the phones on Friday? We have a thing.

Congratulations! You're in.

Hey, can you watch the phones on Friday? We have a thing.

email
Remembered your password? Log In

Log In

It makes us happy to know that you’re back. Have a great day!


Don't have an account? Sign up
Forgot your details? Reset password

Why make an account?

Because why use any of your precious brain cells to remember where you kept those great readings that you’ll use someday at Jeffrey’s B Mitzvah? Make an account, keep the readings there. Easy peasy. The only thing you’ll need to remember is your password, and from personal experience that’s hard enough.


Already have an account? Log In

Congratulations! You're in.

Hey, can you watch the phones on Friday? We have a thing.

got it