Painful Delight

For whatever reason, twisting in my sleep, or the rain-change in the weather, as I sat into my desk chair a bolt of pain shot up through my back and, wincing, I turned my head to the right to look out the window, and there, 8 feet in front of me, in her nest in the spruce tree, the Momma turtle-dove was snuggling up against her two fledglings, too big  now to be under her.

One fledgling raised its short wings, fluttered them,  opened its beak, yawned like a newborn child, then laid its head on Momma’s wing.

I called Mary, “Come and see them.” She picked up the binoculars for an even better look and said, “That is so darling. Momma dove and her babies, snuggled against the misty rain.”

Not from pain but from Nature’s grace, my eyes watered. On his deathbed, snow falling on his face, Issa wrote his final Haiku, “This snow, it too is from heaven.”