Poet Emily Dickinson famously described hope as "the thing with feathers." This metaphor feels particularly apt to me this month as I reflect on the many people & organizations who flocked to support Western North Carolina after last month's devastating hurricane damage. Donations, supplies, first responder teams, and road repair crews winged their way into the mountain towns to bring aid to those in need.

 

Restoration will take a long time, and some places will never be the same. Lives have been lost. For those who have been most directly impacted by the storm, the way forward may still be uncertain right now. Grief does not follow a linear progression of time. Hope may not flutter down in the form of a light & sweet feeling; it may instead look like accepting the hard reality of a loss. It may be the decision to rebuild after the unthinkable has happened.

 

I think again of birds. Last summer, a family of Carolina wrens built a nest under the eave of my porch. I watched the parents build it – the hundred little trips they took, carrying twigs & detritus up to the porch light. And later, when their two babies were born, the hundred little trips with bugs and seeds and whatever else they could find for those insatiable cheeping mouths. One day, I noticed something strange: the parents kept flying up to the nest and hovering in mid-air in front of it. But there was no movement within. When I took out the recycling later that afternoon, I saw why: the babies had fallen onto the rocks below and died. I don't think the parents realized right away. I buried the babies in the backyard. Eventually, the parents stopped fluttering around the porch. The following summer, they built a new nest. These days, when facing down grief and the question of resiliency, I try to think of birds.