Peace

I walked out my front door; I’d just finished the final draft of my new novel, This is Epic, and it was now in copyediting — it even had a retail pub date — October 27, 2026. I did a little dance on my front porch to celebrate. I had been in the writer’s zone for the last month, not paying much attention to other things, trying to make my manuscript as right as I could. I heard a sound of panicked wings and a bird, who had been inside my front porch light, flew off in panic. It was then I saw a nest poking out of the top of the brass lamp just above my doorbell, and the tell-tale streaks of bird poop on the light fixture. A few small bird heads raised and looked at me.

Across the front yard, the mother or father bird was watching me and screeched. I smiled at the baby bird heads. Birds make nests all the time, of course, but this felt deeply special. “Hey,” I said to the babies. Another screech across the yard.

“I’m your friend,” I told the parent bird who glared at me. “I didn’t know you were here until …”

Usually, birds build nests in our backyard. The front seemed like a non-optimal place.

“I won’t turn on the light or anything,” I assured the bird. The babies cheeped, and you know how adorable baby bird cheeps sound. I could hardly stand the cuteness. I sat on the old wooden bench by the front door and wondered how I could help. The answer was, leave them alone, they know what they’re doing. I walked around to the back door so they wouldn’t be scared, but I instantly went to the front door to watch then from the inside. The parent bird flew back with food. I was grinning and feeling like the world, really, was a pretty sweet place. I didn’t know how young the babies were, but none of them had flown away, so I would have to Google what to do. I was right — don’t do anything, don’t turn on the light, use another entrance.

I thought of predators, I thought of the intense joy I was feeling having these birds raise their little ones right outside my door. And then I thought of a story I had read years ago about an art contest. Artists were supposed to create something that symbolized peace. Pictures were submitted of quiet streams, starry skies, and rainbows, but the winning painting didn’t depict any of those images. The artist drew a painting of a bird’s nest on a tree branch in a raging storm. And sitting on the nest, her wings fully extended over her babies, sat a mother bird, her head down. The ultimate protector.

I’m a mom, too. You don’t have to be a mom to understand that instinct to protect no matter what. I wanted to throw my arms around my fledgling novel. I wanted to protect everybody I love no matter how fiercely the storm might rage.

All that’s left of the bird family is the empty nest. I’m leaving it in the front porch brass light fixture. The sky is lovely here in Santa Fe County. The clouds seem to know how to puff up and hang in the sky waiting for their close-up. I did not take a photo of the birds — that would have scared them. But I picture the babies — three of them, maybe four — not teeny anymore, soaring through the sky. How profoundly cool to have wings. I remember my mother telling me when I left the house and pulled my bike around to the front and headed down our walk. “Look both ways, Joanie, not everybody pays attention!”

Here I am looking at the sky, the magnificence of the orange and gold colors, the freshness of the air, my maternal instincts firing. I would not recognize my birds if they flew past, but just in case, I say: “Listen up, you guys, it’s not easy out there. Look both ways… it’s snake season.”

Please help spread the word about my Substack. Thank you for being here.