Table of Contents
Black-Capped Chickadee - (Poecile atricapilla)
Ruffed Grouse - (Bonasa umbellus)
Blue Jay - (Cyanocitta cristata)
Double-Crested Cormorant - (Phalacrocorax auritus)
Ruby-Throated Hummingbird - (Archilochus colubris)
Scarlet Tanager - (Piranga olivacea)
Ring-Billed Gull - (Larus delawarensis)
American White Pelican - (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos)
Chipping Sparrow - (Spizella passerina)
Red-Tailed Hawk - (Buteo jamaicensis)
Downy Woodpecker - (Picoides pubescens)
White-Breasted Nuthatch - (Sitta carolinensis)
European Starling - (Sturnus vulgaris)
Northern Oriole - (Icterus galbula)
Mourning Dove - (Zenaida macroura)
Great Blue Heron - (Ardea herodias)
Eastern Screech Owl - (Otus asio)
Northern Cardinal - (Cardinalis cardinalis)
Common Grackle - (Quiscalus quiscula)
Mallard - (Anas platyrhynchos)
Also by Molly Beth Griffin
Loon Baby
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921
PROLOGUE
American Robin (Turdus migratorius)
I was born blue. Life ripped me early from my safe place and thrust me into the world. It was all so astonishing that I forgot to breathe.
But the puffed-up robin that sang outside the window of the birthing room came early too, that March of 1910, and just in time. He flew north before the spring came so he could sing me into the world. His song said Breathe child, this life was meant for you. When I finally let out my first scream I flushed red as that robin—red: the color of life, blood, love, and fury. At that moment I earned my name, Garnet, after the deep red stone that’s meant to bring courage. “Garnet, for courage,” Aunt Rachel, the midwife, said to me, when I was just a squalling baby.
My mother gave me life that day, but I was the one who decided to take it. I claimed it for myself.
That’s how the story goes. At least, that’s the way Aunt Rachel told it to me a hundred times over, even after I knew it by heart. That’s the version I asked to hear again and again as a child, so I could wrap those pretty words around me like a familiar blanket and fall asleep thinking I knew exactly who I was.
Black-Capped Chickadee
(Poecile atricapilla)
It was the seventeenth of June, 1926, and the Thursday morning streetcar was four minutes late.
On the streetcar platform, tiny birds hopped and pecked around the feet of the waiting crowd. My eyes locked onto one bird, and as I took in the curve of its breast and the fringe of its tail feathers, my fingers worked with sewing scissors, snipping the image out of black paper. Faithfully, the chickadee recreated itself in my hands. A perfect silhouette.
The bird hopped too close to Mother’s tapping foot, and with a startled ruffle of wings it hurried away. I tucked its paper twin into my pocket along with the scissors.
“Mind Mrs. Harrington,” Mother said, frisking invisible dust from the collar of my dress. “And write us often.” Mother fretted on my left, her nervous energy expressed in fidgets and little bursts of conversation like, “We can’t have you getting polio, now can we?” and, “Oh, we will miss you, dear. Won’t we miss her, Albert?”
Father brooded, still and silent as a ghost on my right. He gazed off across the tracks, probably reliving some painful memory of the Battle of the Argonne