"You're a Small Thing and You Must Learn to Fight."

Hardy and I enjoy birdwatching, but usually just from our vantage point at the kitchen table. We have a bird feeder hanging right where we can observe the birds while having our breakfast. During this Covid time, our morning meals have been more drawn out, as we aren't going anywhere most of the time! I keep a list of the birds we see.  Sparrows, chickadees, and juncos are our most frequent visitors during the winter, but in spring and fall we also have robins, woodpeckers, blackbirds, blue jays, and goldfinches stopping by.

Recently we had a visitor we have not seen here before and we were quite horrified.
Hardy was standing at the kitchen sink rinsing some dishes and I was reading the paper at the table when he called me with a sense of urgency in his voice: "Look out the window, Ellie, quickly!" I did, and this is what we saw:

                   

The photo is a bit grainy as it was taken through the window. It's a hawk sitting on a birdhouse on our deck railing. In its claws is a small sparrow, squirming in pain while its predator is kneading it !

I probably disturbed the hawk while taking the picture and it flew to the neighbors' yard where it sat on their shed roof, a dark and sinister shadow, devouring its prey. 

A phrase from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's (1809-1892) In Memoriam  (that long poem he wrote while grieving the death of his friend) came to mind: "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Tennyson's poem was published a decade before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, but the phrase "Nature, red in tooth and claw" quickly became a slogan for those both in opposition and in favor of Darwin's theory. 

Tennyson asks: Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life. 

His friend's death at the prime of life caused a crisis of faith in Tennyson's life. His way of coming to terms with it was to express himself in the form of a long poem.

While rereading the memoir I wrote for my grandchildren (Ellie's Story), I noticed that the mention of death and how I felt about it as a child occurs quite frequently. It is traumatic for children when they first become aware of their mortality, and I was perhaps exposed to it more as a child of refugees constantly fleeing for safety from one place to another. Gradually children learn to put that fear aside until they or their loved ones encounter death personally. The fear is often as bad or worse than the experience itself !

A book I am presently reading is Miriam Toews' Fight Night. The main character and narrator of the story is Swiv, a precocious nine-year-old girl about the age I am in the latter part of my memoir. She lives with her pregnant mother and her elderly grandmother; she is courageous but fearful. Both her mother and her grandmother have experienced the death of loved ones by suicide and Swiv absorbs their emotional pain in her small body. Toews' gritty humor helps me to enjoy this book with its dark undertones of fear, loss, and death.

    

Before reading Miriam Toews' latest book "Fight Night", I read Makhno and Memory by Sean Patterson. Patterson is a doctoral student exploring historical memory in Ukraine's Zaporizhia region over the course of the twentieth century.

"Nestor Makhno has been called a revolutionary anarchist, a peasant rebel, the Ukrainian Robin Hood, a mass murderer, a pogromist, and a devil," who was in conflict with the Mennonites in Southern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War (1917-21). In the autumn of 1919, Makhnovist troops and local peasant sympathizers murdered more than 800 Mennonites in a series of large-scale massacres. It was the beginning of a terrible time for my grandparents and my parents (the latter of whom were young children at the time). 

They were like the sparrow in the talons of the hawk.

However, there is another whole story of privileged landowners and poverty-ridden peasants that needs to be taken into account to put the whole event into perspective. Maybe Makhno was "the small thing" that had "learned to fight".

There are always two sides to a story and the hawk has his own tale !