One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow

by Olivia Hawker

I guess that’s the privilege of the young. Age roots a person, grounds a body to its habits.

Change was coming for me—for all of us, perhaps—a shift like the turning of the seasons, wise and inevitable, a change to remake a world we’d only thought we knew. I was unafraid; I welcomed the rolling of the wheel. But whether my ma and Nettie Mae were prepared, I surely couldn’t say. If they could open their hands and release the old guide ropes to which they had always clung—anger and timidity, lonesomeness and fear, judgment and the fear of being judged—they would free their spirits to seek and find a new way of being, new eyes through which to see.

They said nothing more, for it had become their custom to feel rather than speak—to sense the mood and direction of the other, to trust as the creatures of the prairie trusted to their instincts.

Let joy run out of me. Let it soak the barren ground of this house—my home—and let something new and bright grow up from the field of my past bitterness.