A beautiful thing fell from the sky

I have wanted in some way to preserve the memory of this beautiful thing I found, by chance, a year or so ago. I was walking down my peaceful street in Victoria, when I found a bird’s nest lying on the sidewalk, having blown down in a spring wind. I bent down to look at it, and actually gasped out loud. It was that beautiful. The birds had spun their nest from tiny blue and purple flowers and dried grasses. But the truly remarkable part was the golden blond hair woven into the grasses, combining with the winks of colour from the flowers. The golden hair could very well have been from my young daughter, who has strawberry blonde hair, or even mine, I suppose. (Mine, ahem, is not entirely from nature.) I couldn’t stop staring at this magical creation, which seemed to have dropped from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

I stared at the sidewalk long enough that some neighbours came to have a look, too. And in fact, some of them mentioned it to me later: “It was beautiful, wasn’t it?” I could have kept the nest, but I didn’t. Later I wondered if I should have taken a picture. But I didn’t want to touch it, or change it, or see it on a computer. There was something too perfect about it. I sort of regret it, in a way, because now I can only rely on my memory.

Before writing this, I did an image search to see if anything on the web resembled the nest that appeared on my sidewalk. Nothing even came close. I wonder about the bird.  Did it fly back to the tree, and think where did my beautiful home go? Or was it ready to move on? I guess I’ve been thinking that in an age where we fire our iPhone cameras at everything in our path, perhaps we should leave some things as they are and actually remember them.  And I guess I just did.