Dead bird

With all this curriculum insanity going on in my head it seems hard to focus on what this is all about, which is teaching L. Luckily, the past few days the weather has been perfect: bright, blue blue skies, breezy with just enough edge of chill that it feels good to wear a snuggly sweater but nothing more on top. Good weather means we've been spending time outside where almost everything we do serves to teach us (at least me) something. For instance, yesterday while raking the remnants of winter leaves out of the flower beds --I'm city girl and had no idea that this was even necessary till the day before when a gardener came by and was shocked at the amount of leaf crap that was smothering all the baby green things to death, but I digress-- we found a dead robin that we suspect flew into one of our windows; its neck was bent at a disturbingly unnatural angle.

We decided to give it a funeral, so L dug a little hole next to China's grave (my brother's kitty who is buried in the front yard). I gingerly scooped the little corpse up with a rake (the empty eye sockets freaked me out too much to touch even with gloves) and deposited it in the ground. The whole family assembled, we all said a few words. I gave a short lecture on how the bird would be eaten by worms and bugs and decompose so that it would become earth again. D said, "Rest in peace, birdy." T yelled, "Get up birdy! The birdy not listening to me!". And L read a very zen poem she wrote:

On a bird's death
As we don't know if it is a boy or a girl

Then we covered it up with dirt, decorated the site with flowers, maple leaves and a rock to remember it by.

One dead little bird and we got to talk about death and decomposition, write and recite poetry, and do art. Not bad for a totally unprepared afternoon.