Building and Birds
Nancy E. Head
Teacher, Author of Wandering Swallow, now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other booksellers, Speaker, DTM, Colson Fellow.
What follows is an excerpt from Jude and the Magic Birds–as yet unpublished. I’m preparing the text for an editor’s eye and planning to pitch in May at the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference–if it happens. Jude is 10 years old and visiting Grampa for the summer. This is chapter one.
Most people would say my grampa was odd. Maybe he was. But maybe most people ought to be more odd. In a lot of ways, he was like most grampas, I guess. He was—well—old. And sometimes he told me stories I’d heard a hundred times. But he helped teach me stuff a lot of people, even grampas, don’t know.
Grampa had some friends who he said helped him figure things out. They’d teach me some lessons too. Not only how to figure things out. But also when not to try to figure things out. How to let life unfold even when you can’t understand what’s happening or why.
And Grampa was smart in a lot of other ways too. He liked to build things. But he didn’t build things the way most people do. Did I mention he was odd?
The summer I was ten, Grampa and I built a treehouse together in his back yard. I had no idea what the place would come to mean—and not just to me.
When we started out, it was hard and sweaty work. He mapped out a square on the ground next to the big hickory tree in his back yard. At each corner, we dug a hole in the ground. And we dug deep—so deep my fingers could just touch the bottom if I stretched my arm out the whole way. He planted a fat wood post in each hole. And we poured cement around the posts. And that’s how our treehouse began.
Grampa said, “A house built in a tree will last till the first big storm. Plant a building in solid ground if you want it to last. I want ya to know what it means to build somethin’ with your own hands. Not a sandcastle ya knock over in a few minutes. But somethin’ that’ll still be there after you’re gone.”
We put a floor on top of the pillars, added steps (real steps, not just a ladder) going from the ground up to the floor. Then we put up walls with windows and a roof. I helped a lot.
“Tighten the screw there, Jude.” And I did. It felt like it had taken forever for him to let me use a hammer and drill. I still wasn’t allowed to touch the electric saw though. We used rough wood for the walls and floor and stood beside each other sanding the window frames. That was more hard work. Then we stained them. That was more fun than sanding was, but my fingers stayed brown for days.
I helped Grampa set a stained glass window in one wall with red, blue, purple, brown, white, and yellow glass in the shapes of a cross, an angel, and a dove.
“On the south side, we’ll set in plain glass. There’ll be plenty o’ light. That stained glass window’ll let light in but not glare when the sun is getting’ ready to set. And the clear glass window’ll make a picture of every season.”
Green in spring and summer. Yellow in the fall. And when the leaves fall off the trees, I can still see stars at night above the mountain. And in the daytime, I can see the top of the mountain. That’s the mountain Grampa and I climbed together. I used to call that mountain a hill. But I can tell you about that in a bit.
“Y’know, Jude,” Grampa said once when we were sitting in the treehouse eating s’mores, “There’re more stars than you can see. City lights make the night sky too bright. Remember that. There’s always more than you can see.”
We sat up there eating s’mores a lot—even when it was cold outside. And we watched through the window for the wildlife that lived in the woods near Grampa’s yard.
“Hey, do you hear that cardinal?” he asked? “Look, there he is with his mate.”
I looked around for the red bird and brown bird but couldn’t find them.
“Over there,” he pointed.
And then I saw them.
Grampa and I put up birdbaths and feeders for hummingbirds, cardinals, and all kinds of other birds. And we worked in the garden together too. We kept the weeds from pushing out flowers and berry bushes. Flowers and berries attracted insects. And the bugs attracted birds.
Sometimes if we were real still, chickadees would sit on his shoulders or the top of his cap. And once they sat, they’d stay awhile even if he moved or talked.
“Folk legends attach meanin’ to birds,” he told me once. “Eagles are strong and honest and close to God. Falcons fly long distances, and the tame ones stand for those who reach for the heights and try to do right. Hawks are the messengers of angels.”
“Get that, Grampa! Angels are messengers who have messengers!”
He nodded and continued, “Cardinals mean angels are near. An’ hummingbirds remind us of resurrection. Lots of other birds have their own meanings too. If you listen to ’em, you can learn a lot.”
“Yeah, right, Grampa. Like birds can talk.”
“Don’t you be so sure, Bud.”
Grampa didn’t just talk about birds. He knew lots of other stuff too. And he knew just what it was to be—like me.
He told me, “When I was growin’ up, I thought the worst thing was havin’ to sit still in school.”
“Oh, Grampa, me too!”
“’I wanted to be outside makin’ my own adventures. When I couldn’t though, I’d enjoy Tom Sawyer paintin’ the fence or playin’ pirate. Huck Finn floatin’ on the raft with Jim. And Peter leading the army in Narnia.
“Peter’s my favorite.”
“Mine too.” He winked.
And Grampa could read the clouds.
“You know it’ll rain the next day when high clouds come in and the wind blows east. You can see a storm comin’ when it gets dark to the west.”
Grampa was a regular weatherman. Well, he wasn’t really a weatherman—like the people who tell you what the day’s going to be like on TV. He was a farmer till Gramma got sick. He stayed on the farm after she died. That was before I was born. He still kept his flowers and a garden with tomatoes and beans and stuff. And there’s a patch of Christmas trees—for Christmas. The rest turned into woods and grew wild, but he didn’t let it get too thick. He’d cut out dead trees for the wood stove that kept the house warm. When we came to visit, Dad helped cut and I stacked the wood.
Starting when I was six, I’d visit Grampa every summer for a few weeks by myself. My parents and I would visit as often as we could—every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. A four hour drive to Denver and a three and a half hour flight from Colorado to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Then it’d be about another hour in a car to Pottsville where Grampa lived. I walked around the plane as much as they’d let me, and I squirmed a lot in the car—but I knew there were good things ahead. The ride home was always a lot longer.
Mom said it was like the place had a cord tied tight around her. It pinched when she was younger. But when she went away to college, the cord became elastic. She met Dad. They got married. They got jobs. Then they got me.
Grampa’s place always tugged us back. Of course, the biggest part pulling us was just seeing Grampa. And sometimes Uncle Alan—Mom’s brother—and his family would visit too. They live in Nevada. But they come back every other Christmas.
After I was born, Mom said the cord pulling us to Grampa’s place got shorter. I liked Grampa’s, but I liked where we lived too. Colorado had its own pull with the gigantic mountains and lots of snow. And there were cool friends in school and on my hockey team.
But back to the summer I was ten.
When Grampa and I weren’t in the treehouse or garden, we’d hike all over. I remember the last walk we went on before I went home that summer.
Grampa grabbed his walking stick and said, “Jude, let’s go.”
He had carved that stick a long time ago when he and Gramma were young. They were waiting for my mom to get there. Grampa was nervous about being a daddy. He said he wore off his nerves shaping the stick with fancy designs—birds and trees and mountains. At the top of the stick, he carved a big eagle.
When we walked, he’d get ahead of me sometimes, and he was mumbling—liked he’d be talking with the bird and waiting for it to answer. Crazy, right? I used to think so too. Grampa painted the bird to look real. Most of the paint’s rubbed off now. But the bird still stands tall.
We walked along a curvy path that day. The sun was hot. But the trees formed a cool tunnel around us. Grampa mumbled to the bird. And paused. Then he said—as if to the bird—“Still round the corner there may wait/ A new road or a secret gate.”
“What’s that, Grampa?” I asked.
“It’ll be hot tomorrow,” he said. “July’s comin’ right about time for July.”
We wound our way around another bend and came to a clearing.
The mountain stood high above us. It wasn’t like mountains we had at home. They stretched to the sky and had snow on them—even in the summer. Grampa’s mountain was rounder and only had snow sometimes in the winter. But it still looked pretty big from where we stood.
“Next summer, Jude, you and I’ll climb that mountain.”