The Backyard Bird Chronicles

by Amy Tan

It fulfills a deep and instinctive urge to plug into the rhythms of what is happening around us. It makes us part of something larger and gives us a sense of our place on earth.

I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability. I do that daily, and not with dread, but with awareness that life contains ephemeral moments, which can be saved in words and images, there for pondering, for reviving the bird and my heart.

I hope I never cease to be amazed.

There are many things in my life that make me feel I am very, very lucky. I can now add a pair of owls living in my yard as among them.