The Horsehair Nest

I had just spent some months recovering from an injury I received in an automobile accident. I spent much of that time wondering how well the injury would heal and if I would be able to continue some of my favorite sports that seemed so important to me. I was frustrated and angry. So I did what I usually do in that case: I stopped trying to focus on my summer reading list, and went for a walk.

I couldn't walk very far without wincing in pain. So I just walked around the farm, through the long bright pasture grass I walked and thought about my family, my parents, long dead, and my brother and sister who lived far away. I thought about how I had spent thirty years so busy with work that I rarely had time to contact them or think about them. I thought about how a professional life passes so quickly, and how little time there is for things like pulling weeds, or walking with no destination or goal.

I grieved for the days when I could jounce along in a third class train to some unknown village in Indonesia to attend a country fair, or toss a heavy backpack on my back and walk in from the Upper Works to Lake Colden in the Adirondacks. I thought bitterly about how I had covered eight miles in one hour and fifty minutes sliding down the Maumee River in a knife edged kayak. I thought about free climbing Rattlesnake Point in Ontario. I thought about what a hollow, stale substitute a walk around my poor little farm was for all those wonderful things.

By the time I had made one circuit of the farm, I was in a thorough swivet. I noticed the pile of fire bricks we had bought to line an outdoor bread oven. Grass was eagerly growing up along the edges of the pale bricks. Well, I would not be doing all that heavy lifting for quite some time. Whenever would that project be done now?

Something caught my attention. It was a robin's nest, lined in black horse tail hair. The hair had been woven and stuffed and meticulously threaded into the nest's fine grey twigs and dried grass. There were a few pale bits of shell in the bottom of the deep little nest, a small miracle of blue. Just as carefully as the nest had been woven, my partner had placed the nest there for me to find. He had thought of me. Doing my farm chores for me, he had thought, 'she will enjoy this'.

I picked the nest up and held it in cupped hands, and examined each bit of shell and feasted on the beauty of the weaving and the glossy black horse hair. A spindly june bug floated by in the air, a hundred little gnats jazzed in a complicated pattern in front of me, like a moving parabola. A dragon fly with irridescent black and clear wings shot past. I smelled the unbearably sweet perfume of freshly cut grass, and looked at the perfect, luminously edged soft yellow petals of the magnolia tree. I heard the soft grunting of brown ducks, crouching in the shade, and the distant barking of a frantic dog.

Being alive is like the little horsehair nest. Things happen that are inexplicable. We feel joy, we suffer. These emotions are like waves that break over us and pass, leaving ripples in the water. Afterward, we are but left again with ourselves, floating on an endless sea, woven of the smallest beautiful things like the horsehair nest, and of the limitless little acts of love that lead us to the horse hair nest.