Prompts work: Waiting in the wings
After the writing prompt “look out your window, tell what you see…” I was inspired to write a second piece. Writing prompts work.
We let her move in because she is beautiful.
Her blush color, long neck and full breast, her sweet morning cooing are otherworldly. When she appeared on the railing, perfectly framed by our front window, she looked like she was already home. With a twig in her beak, her head turned south, a peace symbol come to life.
We don’t discourage the nest she is building in the old brass lamp we never turn on anyway. Inches from our front porch door and directly below a favored lawn chair spot, she delivers sticks and twigs to her place. The lamp clanging occasionally as she sets up shop, her wings rushing to a stop before the brick wall. We listen. We watch.
A blustery day, the kind only a spring in the Midwest knows, must have shattered her home. We discovered a small white egg among scattered twigs on the lawn chair below her nest. We fretted about what to do, but read it was OK to return the egg to the nest. She thanked us with her continued residence, her loose twigs littering our doorstep a reminder of her tenancy.
Would we have let her stay if she was a common house wren? A starling? A wasp?
Fortune favors the beautiful.
We wait for her hatchlings to start making a racket and for the flurry of avian activity to descend on our front porch.
Each week my spouse and I write short essays to share with each other — under 300 words, submitted within 24 hours, and written off of a prompt. This story was sparked by another earlier prompt.
